


it's just chemicals that make me cling to you

by cmajorchords



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: ALL THE ANGST, Angst, Anxiety Attacks, Anxiety Disorder, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Cutting, Drug Dealing, Drugs, F/F, F/M, Past Drug Use, Psychic Abilities, Romance, Self-Harm, Soulmates AU, Swearing, Tumblr Prompt (sort of)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 06:15:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4211214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmajorchords/pseuds/cmajorchords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soulmates AU from this Tumblr text post:</p><p>AU where people age until they reach 18 and then stop aging until they meet their soul mate so they can grow old together. (user: reliquiaen, http://reliquiaen.tumblr.com/post/116987330899/au-where-people-age-until-they-reach-18-and-then)</p><p> </p><p>Clarke's been waiting seventy-four years for her mark to light up pink, and she isn't going to let her asshole soul mate stop her from getting her happy ending. Not when she's already lost so much for it. Too bad she has no idea where to even begin searching for him, and she's pretty sure he'll be long dead by the time she gets there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. if i walk this way, it's an easy way home

**Author's Note:**

> title from st. patrick by pvris. chapter title from hand in hand by walking on cars, their entire ep is awesome.
> 
> set in an alternate universe where there was no racial segregation and no sexual preference discrimination things and also commercial flights before 1976 and also cell phones. as you can probably already tell, this entire thing is a long-winded disaster and so poorly researched i'm disgusted with myself. disclaimer: i have not actually been to most of the countries mentioned, so you know, heads up.
> 
> EDITED 28/6/15

**Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. 1948.**

It happens like this:

Her mother holds her on her lap, and strokes her hair in a way that makes her eyelids droop and her muscles relax. “Sweetheart, you’re going to be fine,” she whispers. “You’re going to find him someday.”

She’s seven years old and she doesn’t get it, doesn’t get why her mother’s dying just because her father has, doesn’t even really get what dying means. But she says, “Promise?”

“Promise,” her mother whispers into her ear. She has to ignore how her mother’s hands shake on her head, the way the center of her entire universe now feels almost insubstantial. “You’re going to be just fine, Clarke.”

It doesn’t feel alright, the way she can already feel her mother slipping out of her grasp. The way there are people waiting outside the closed door to take the body away. The way the graves have been prepared side by side, for three weeks now.

“Why do you have to leave?”

“You’ll understand when you’re older.” There’s the briefest pause, and then her mother pulls her face up and presses a kiss to her forehead, the tip of her nose, both cheeks. “They’re going to take care of you. You’ll want for nothing. Do you understand?”

“I don’t want you to leave.”

The softest smile. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. But it’s going to be fine. I promise.”

 

* * *

 

The first memory she has of her childhood is of the tiny burn-like mark on the inside of her mother’s wrist lighting up bright red, and then her mother falling to her knees on the kitchen floor. Everything spins; and then her mother is buried with her father, and Wells, her best friend, is standing stoically at her side while his father, Thelonious, takes her by the hand and leads her away from the graves.

“She’s taken care of the rest of your life,” he tells her, settling her into the couch of the house they tell her she has to move out of. “You’ll live with us until you’re of age. All your mother’s accounts and deeds and property have been transferred over to your name, and you will officially become my ward. You have a trust fund, which I will manage until you can do it yourself. She’s – you’re going to be fine, Clarke, do you hear me?”

She knows that. Her mother did promise. Nothing feels fine, though, although she nods along anyway.

“Would you like anything to eat now, Clarke?”

Everyone is treating her like glass. Fragile, breakable. She wonders if it’s something in her expression, or maybe it’s just the fact that she’s seven years old and they’re telling her that she’s never going to see either of her parents again.

What is death? She has to wonder. Is it nice there? What kind of people are there? Do they have milk and cookies there, the kind that Wells’ father is setting out on the table for the three of them right now? What’s the weather like?

She suspects there’s something the adults aren’t telling her. Wells presses a chocolate chip cookie into her hand, frowning worriedly down at her. The crumbs litter the leather of his couch; her mother had never let her eat anywhere but the table, says she’ll make a mess too hard to clean up.

She bites into the cookie mechanically, and pretends not to notice when Thelonious’ hand comes up as if to stroke her hair, before it drops without feeling anything but empty air.

 

* * *

  

**New York City, United States of America. 2015.**

On her birth certificate, the lines read: Clarke Griffin. Born 1941, May 7, to Abigail and Jake Griffin.

The first thing she does every morning when she wakes up is cross off another day on the calendar. Then she looks up and reads the day’s date, searing it fast into her brain like her address, or phone number. Today’s is April 4, 2015. That would make her a month short of seventy-four years old.

The second thing she does every morning is go to the bathroom. She flips on the lights, and then raises her right wrist up to the harsh fluorescents to check that the tiny burn-like mark on her wrist is still sharp and present; no matter how hard she scrubs, no matter how deep she cuts, it never gives an inch. Then she puts her wrist down, pressing her palms into the cold marble of her sink counter, and leans forward to examine her face in the mirror.

Seventy-four years old, and not a single frown line.

She still doesn’t look a day over eighteen. Probably because she isn’t, not technically.

Sighing a little, Clarke leans back and gets started with her morning routine. Shower, brush teeth, comb hair, consider makeup, dismiss it out of hand. Throw hair into sloppy ponytail, get dressed. Grab things, out of the house in under thirty minutes. She’s got the entire thing down to autopilot, which should only make sense, considering how long she’s had to perfect it.

Seventy-four years. She must be the unluckiest human in all of being.

There’s nothing in the fridge, so she doesn’t bother making a pit stop there for breakfast. She slips on shoes – sensible black sneakers – and heads out the door without looking back.

She rides a bike to work, because she can’t be bothered trying to navigate the traffic of the overpopulated city, especially not so early in the morning. It’s mostly a straight line from her apartment building to the hospital she works at, has worked at for nearly a decade now – she’d picked the place exactly for its easy access to the one place she still wants to be. On the way, though, she stops and parks the bike along the railing of the sidewalk, and walks into the coffee shop opposite.

Raven spots her as soon as she walks in; Raven, the only friend in the city she’s made so far in her stay here, since she got a job at the local kindergarten to teach art three decades ago, before she’d decided to be a doctor after all. Raven also looks eighteen when she should be forty-eight, which is partially the reason they’d bonded in the first place.

The first and only friend she’s made, and she’s even paid to be nice.

“Your usual?” she calls over cheerfully, already reaching for a takeaway cup.

“Yeah,” Clarke agrees, walking to the counter. She glances at the glass display as she passes. “And two of those blueberry muffins.”

“I made those this morning.”

Clarke smiles. “Especially for me?”

“The things I do,” Raven sighs dramatically, and then slides a steaming cup of black coffee in front of her. She reaches down, and bags two of the muffins before putting that on the counter, too, going to ring her up. “Think today will be the day?”

There is something like wistfulness in Raven’s voice, but when Clarke meets her eyes, she sees only steely resolve. She swallows. “Maybe,” she says, and thinks,  _never_.

“Yeah,” Raven agrees, her eyes sliding away. No one wants to talk about how they’ve been waiting decades for their soul mates to show up, forever committed to being eighteen while everyone else ages and dies before their eyes, having absolutely nothing to look forward to each day –

Clarke pays for the drink and muffins, stowing the latter into her bag for later. “Good day,” she says, and Raven returns the favor, her attention already going to the new customers walking in through her door.

Breathing in the scent of coffee fumes, Clarke grabs the door before it can close on her. She tilts the cup up to drink, and then –

Her foot hits the pavement wrong. She doubles over, suddenly very aware of the coffee spilling all over her shoes, wonders why she can’t hold on to the cup, can’t hold on the air suddenly very much not in her lungs, wonders why there are black spots swimming in her eyes. There’s a sudden pain in the middle of her chest, like something very vital to her continued survival has just been ripped away violently, leaving nothing but gaping open space.

Out of the corner of her field of vision, she catches sight of her right wrist, angled up just right for the mark on it to catch the light.

It’s bright red and pulsing.

_Oh_ , Clarke thinks vaguely, and then passes out.

 

* * *

 

She wakes up in the hospital with both Raven and her crowd of newly minted interns around her, all frowning and worried. “I’m fine,” she says, and then scrunches her eyes back shut.

“You’re not,” Raven says immediately, because of course she’d noticed. A second later her wrist is grabbed, there’s a mild noise of weak protest from one of her interns, and the soul mate mark is being shoved into her face. “Look at this shit.”

She opens her eyes. Sits up. Holds her wrist up to the light to examine. “Huh,” she says, and swallows hard. “It’s never done that before.”

The mark is glowing bright red. In all her years at the hospital, she’s seen a lot, but this – she’s never seen this. She kind of understands why she’s in a hospital bed, now; she has to be kept for examination. The research on the soul mate mark is never ending, and here, another piece of the puzzle is falling into place.

But there’s something inside of her urging her to action, to get up out of the bed, move, do something, go somewhere. She has no idea where, or what, but she knows she has to go. Fast.

“They – When your soul mate dies, it’s supposed to flash red, before fading away. But yours won’t go out,” one of the interns say timidly. “They say yours is lit up like this because your soul mate is danger, or hurt, or – dying.”

Seventy-four years, and her soul mate may be dead before she even glimpses his face. She wants to laugh at the irony of it all, but can’t help thinking maybe the feeling spurring her into action has something to do with this after all.

“But no one really knows for sure,” another intern adds quickly.

Clarke slides her legs out of the bed. “I – I have to go,” she says, and thinks she’s semi-coherent at best. She looks around the room, scanning it. “Where are my things?”

Raven catches her arms. “They need to do tests, Clarke, they –”

“You should go back to the café, you have a business to run,” Clarke interrupts, and takes a deep, steadying breath. “I have to go find my soul mate.”

There’s no way she’s going to let that idiot die without even meeting him first. There’s no way she’s going to let him take her down with him, not like this. She’s been waiting seventy-four fucking years for this, he can’t just _die_ on her.

“Do you even know where to begin?” Raven demands. “Look, the doctor was called, he should be here any moment now.”

“Raven, I  _am_  a doctor. And I’m fine. But my soul mate isn’t, so either you’re going to let me go, or –” Clarke catches her breath, hard, wide-eyed and panting.

Raven pauses for a long moment, and then finally releases her and steps back. “You run into any trouble, you call me,” she says tightly. “Do you understand? You don’t know what kind of situation he may be in.”

Clarke hesitates only briefly, before pulling Raven into her arms. “I’ll be fine,” she says. “You know I will. She promised.”

 

* * *

 

**Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. 1950.**

They learn about soul mates in Life Skills class in the second grade.

She sits next to Wells, where she’s sat for a year now. When the teacher hands out reading materials and writes the subject of the day’s lecture on the board, his hand comes over and squeezes hers tight. “I’m fine,” she says automatically, not a stranger to those words nor the ones that immediately surface in her head:  _she promised_.

Wells flings her an unconvinced look and holds her hand that much tighter. She’s grateful, because the mark on her wrist has never seemed brighter.

She thinks she already knows all there is to know about soul mates. Wells’ father had tried to explain it to her, a week after the joint funeral – they’d waited until her mother had died to hold her father’s, so they could be buried together, as if they could predict that she would die. And as Thelonious had explained, they _could_ predict.

No one ever outlived their soul mate, not by much.

 

* * *

 

She’d been seven years old, but even then she’d seen the horror of her mother’s eyes as she knelt on the kitchen floor, unable to breathe or feel anything else but pain. She knows why the soul mate marks operate like they do, releasing poison once it no longer meant anything, because it must be the most cruel hurt of all to be alive when the one person you loved wasn’t.

But what about her? Didn’t she count as anything, in the eyes of the soul mate mark?

No, Thelonious had said, his dark eyes infinitely wise and sad, and he’d swallowed thickly and turned away.

But what about you? She’d asked next. What about Mrs Jaha?

My wife and I were … an exception, not the rule, he’d seemed to force out. Your parents, they’re the rule.

If Wells gets to have you stay, why couldn’t my mother stay?

I’m sorry, Clarke, truly, he’d said, too gently, and then walked away. Apparently some things, even adults can’t handle.

She’d been left there, sitting alone on the Jahas’ couch, too big to sit on without company. Wells was at school’ she’d been excused for the week, because it seemed like losing her parents warranted only a week to grieve when losing a soul mate warranted a lifetime to do the same.

Then she’d twisted her arm around and held up her own soul mate mark to squint at. It glimmers on the precipice of her skin, ugly and a disgusting dark brown. When her parents had been together, their marks had been a pretty rosy pink, like a faded scar, like blushing cheeks. Hers is just – unsightly. Unremarkable.

She hates it. She hates it so much that she gets up and goes to the kitchen and finds the largest knife she can reach, and then she slices her wrist open and tries to gauge the imprint off her skin.

It doesn’t work.

Thelonious finds her half an hour later, spilling blood onto the floor while she sits mesmerized by her newly clean skin; he takes her to the hospital, calmly and steadily like he’d been expecting it. A fortnight later, when the bandages are removed and the stitches are snipped out carefully, the mark is still there, bright and new, taunting her with death.

It doesn’t work, but it’s given her an idea, at least.

  

* * *

 

 

“Clarke,” Wells says in a hushed, but urgent, undertone. “You’re not breathing.”

Clarke frowns, and realizes she’s been holding her breath for – too long. She’s lightheaded, almost. It’s something she does when she’s nervous, or scared, and it’s probably not the best coping mechanism, forcing the world to stop and spin around her, but it’s what she’s got. When her mother’s body had been carried away, she’d held her breath for so long she’d fainted. At the funeral, it was only Wells’ grip around her wrist, loosening and tightening in pulses, that reminded her when to inhale and exhale.

She breathes out, and then back in, establishing a pattern. Beside her, the creases between Wells’ eyebrows smooth a little, but not much.

On the board, the teacher has written a few key points – soul mate stages. Life. Death. Love. Too big questions, people have argued, for a second-grade curriculum. But it’s easier to learn these things when the minds are young and malleable – no one wants people rebelling against the soul mate system, refuse to have love and the rest of their life dictated to them by something worse than fate, to go out searching for their own path.

The system works. It’s what has been in place for going on a century now, and it works.

Clarke remembers her mother collapsing to her knees on the kitchen floor, realizes she remembers the mundane the most: the sunlight streaking in through the half-closed blinds. The pastel of the flowers sitting in a glass of water on the countertop. The flour that smears across otherwise pristine marble ledges as her mother goes down.

“Miss, I need to go to the bathroom,” she says before she can help herself. She’s out of her chair, out of Wells’ grasp, out of the classroom before anyone else can react, and then she’s gasping for breath like she’s just run a marathon, because she’s been holding her breath for far too long.

“Clarke?”

“Leave me alone,” she says brusquely, without turning to see who it is. She knows who it is, there’s only ever been one person willing to go after her when she most needs it, even though her mother promised – she  _promised_  –

“Clarke, breathe,” Wells says gently, and turns her around, pulling her into the softest embrace. “Daddy says you need to breathe.”

His father had said a lot of things. This, though, is the only one that really makes sense to her, even now.

Clarke closes her eyes, and breathes.

  

* * *

 

 

**LaGuardia Airport, New York, United States of America. 2015**

The one time the soul mate mark might’ve come in handy, and it refuses to cooperate, or even be slightly more than useless, really. It’s ridiculous.

Clarke curses beneath her breath, scanning the departures board in the middle of the airport. The mark still burns like a bitch beneath the soothing cream and bandages she’d slapped on it when she’d raced home to throw a few things into a bag, and then she’d immediately hailed a cab to the airport. She may have all the time in the world – she’s had seventy-four ears and that already seems like far too long for this kind of life – but she has no idea at all how long her soul mate has.

It’s only the added pulsing on top of her pulse point at her wrist that keeps her grounded, because that tells her he’s (or she, fuck, she has no idea who she’s supposed to be looking for, has no idea what she’s doing, why couldn’t these things come with a GPS system? Aren’t they in the twenty-first century?) still alive, at least. What kind of alive, she has no clue, but at leas the throbbing, consistent pain stops her from obsessively tearing apart her bandage every six seconds to make sure the mark hasn’t faded away already.

So now she’s standing in the middle of the airport like an idiot, clutching a backpack full of immediate necessities and nothing else, scanning the boards for something that might pop out at her.

No luck.

“Fuck,” she mutters. It earns her a dirty look from a mother with two children, walking by with too much luggage. She glares right back. The woman’s soul mate mark is shown off like pretty jewelry, a status symbol, bright pink and gleaming with love, and Clarke’s is killing her. She has a right.

Finally, she sighs, because the departures board is giving her a seizure with its lights and flickering, and just goes up at a whim to the nearest check-in counter.

“Welcome, can I see your –”

“Sorry, but where is this flight going?”

The stewardess blinks up at her. “Uh, you don’t know?”

Clarke shrugs. “I haven’t bought a ticket yet.”

“Well, uh, we’ve got a full flight, but there are a few more seats in first class if you’d like –”

“Destination?” she demands impatiently.

“Paris,” the stewardess squeaks out.

Clarke leans back, taking a moment to consider it. She’s always liked Paris. She’d been once, in the early eighties. It had been – nice, but it’s the city of lights and love, and so it could’ve been far nicer. She hadn’t been there under the best of situations, and she’d hoped that the circumstances that might take her back there someday would be better.

Fine. Whatever. At least the food is good, she’s assured of that much, even if she finds no sign of whoever is making the mark hurt like a son of a bitch.

“Done,” she says, and then slaps down her passport and credit card.

The stewardess looks relieved, like she’d been expecting Clarke to make a scene. She gets her first-class plane ticket a second before an alert rings in on her phone, informing her of how much that had cost.

Well, she’s had seventy-four years to save, and she’d never been a huge spender. She can afford it, and probably the rest of the flights she’ll be taking to search for her asshole soul mate, with ease.

“Asshole,” she mumbles. Why does she have to be the one to go looking, honestly, of all the irresponsible –

“Sorry?”

“Not you,” Clarke sighs, checks her ticket, and heads off to find the gate.

If she has to be the one to do all the work, she might as well be comfortable doing it, she justifies. There’s a tiny tightness in her chest, though, the burning of her wrist, that tell her this extended vacation is going to be nothing like the backpacking trip she and Wells had taken across Eastern Europe and half of Asia, the summer after their senior year. 

 

* * *

 

 

The flight is five minutes away from boarding when Clarke remembers that her current responsibilities are not to just her asshole soul mate, and she puts down the sandwich she’d been scarfing down in lieu of a proper lunch and picks up her cell phone instead.

He picks up on the first ring, because he’s responsible and well brought up and an upstanding global citizen, and everything her asshole soul mate isn’t. Honestly, her life would’ve been far easier if their marks had glowed together on their eighteenth birthdays, the way everyone expected them to, but no. He has to be the lucky one, and she has to be the one to spend far too many decades at eighteen.

“Clarke?”

Clarke remembers a time when his voice had been bright and lively. Now it’s – well, it’s not any less bright or lively, but there’s definitely more weighing down upon it. Seventy-four years of actual life, with maybe two years of searching in between, will do that to someone. She’s far more envious of his aging than she’ll ever let on. “Wells,” she says, and breathes out deliberately.

“I can hear you breathing. You only do that when you’re – are you okay? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“And you’re supposed to be asleep,” she counts. “Isn’t it nighttime in Singapore?”

“I couldn’t sleep. And good thing too, because you’re obviously in desperate need of my sage wisdom –”

Clarke snorts. She can’t help herself. She can hear Wells’ grin through the phone, as well, when he continues, “So really, what’s wrong?”

“I –”

“FLIGHT 1508 TO CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT IN PARIS, FRANCE, BOARDING COMMENCES NOW AT GATE 67. FIRST ADMITTING PASSENGERS SEATED IN FIRST AND BUSINESS CLASS.”

“Clarke, what was – are you at an airport?”

Clarke takes a moment to make sure she’s breathing – in, out, in, out – before she says, “Wells. This morning, when I was getting coffee, my soul mate mark – something weird happened. It hurt. Like an actual wound. Like, you know, like he was dying or something, and it went red, but it hasn’t faded, and it still hurts. And they say that it’s because he’s in danger, or dying, but he’s not dead. So I –”

“So you’re going to go find him,” Wells surmises, and then pauses. “How?”

“I guess I’ll just have to go where my gut tells me,” Clarke answers vaguely.

“Meaning you don’t know,” Wells says flatly.

“I have no fucking clue,” Clarke confesses. “I just – I can’t possibly search the whole world. But –”

“You have to at least try,” Wells finishes, because of course he knows. He may look his real age when Clarke looks nothing close to it, but he knows, because he’s the one person she can really trust. “I get that. I would do the same for Harper.”

Harper, his soul mate. Clarke’s happy for them, she really is, but it’s hard to be happy when Wells had only ever been hers for twenty whole years. If only they hadn’t gone on that backpacking –

She’s happy for them.

“So I’m going to see where this thing takes me,” Clarke says. Breath in, breathe out. Don’t panic. Don’t hold your breath. “Gut instinct. At the hospital, they tell me that’s worth something.”

“And your gut instinct told you Paris?”

“Well, no, but I’ve got to start somewhere, haven’t I?”

Wells pauses for too long. And then he says, with too much forced levity, “At least come back for my funeral. You still are my best friend, even if it looks like you’re my granddaughter or an unfortunate mid-life crisis whenever we go out into public together.”

Clarke grins. “You’re the best, Wells,” she says, unable to stop the fondness leaking out into her voice.

“Don’t have too much fun without me,” Wells warns, and then his voice softens infinitesimally. “Look, Clarke, you’ll find him, or her, or it, I don’t even care. But you’re going to find them. And you’re going to be fine.”

_She promised._

“I love you, Wells.”

“I love you too. Good luck. He won’t know what hit him.”

Clarke hangs up, throws away the remains of the sandwich, and goes to board the plane.

 

* * *

 

 

**Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. 1959**

Wells’ eighteenth birthday comes three days earlier than hers. That makes for three days of anxious fidgeting, half-assed schoolwork, and an unspoken impatience that hangs between them every time they speak, which is often. It’s distracting, but to be sure neither of them actually have real doubts about their fates.

On the night of her eighteenth birthday, he knocks on her bedroom door and she lets him in, just like they’d agreed on. It’s five minutes to midnight; after she’d gone through puberty, his father had never allowed them together in the same room alone like this, especially not so late at night. There’s a special kind of thrill that accompanies him climbing into her bed beside her, even if they’re not doing anything, even if he’s done it a hundred times before in broad daylight.

“Wells,” she begins, thinking she should probably say something, but he only smiles at her. From the arm twisted behind his back, he brings out a little cupcake, with peanut butter frosting and a tiny candle in the middle.

It’s like something out of a movie. This entire scene might as well be out of a movie – and she can only hope for a happy ending.

“I couldn’t find matches, I was in a hurry,” he confesses sheepishly. “I guess you’ll just have to pretend.”

“Who cares about the wish? I’ve already got everything I want, now that you’re presenting me with food.” She grins at him impishly.

Wells frowns. “Don’t jinx it, Clarke, you’ve done it now –”

She glances down involuntarily at the mark on her wrist. “If it’s set in this, then it’s set. There’s nothing I could say or do to jinx it, you know that, Wells.”

“Unfortunately, I’m not the aspiring doctor taught only to think in black and white and logical proofs,” Wells snorts back.

“Yeah, because you’re superstitious.”

“I'm not superstitious, it’s simply –”

The grandfather clock downstairs starts chiming the hours. The both of them freeze, and look down simultaneously at the twin marks on their wrists, placed facing up on top of the bedspread. She counts the chimes in her head – nine, ten, eleven, twelve –

The clock stops chiming, the house settling back into silence. Their marks remain lifeless and dark brown, exactly as they had been a minute before.

“Maybe something went wrong,” Wells says, and swallows hard. “Maybe the effects won’t kick in until morning. Clarke, this doesn’t mean anything.”

But Clarke can feel the sudden, overpowering emptiness in the pit of her stomach. She slowly retracts her arm, and makes herself look up to meet Wells’ eyes. He looks – desperate. Torn. Speechless. She knows exactly how he feels, because she’s probably feeling the same at this moment. “Wells,” she says slowly, “I think we both know exactly what this means.”

It takes him a moment, but he carefully puts her peanut butter cupcake down on the table next to her bed. Then he leans in – she freezes, has to remind herself to breathe – and kisses her, too lightly, on the cheek. When he leans back, she can see the way his jaw is clenching and unclenching, the way it does whenever he’s trying to rein in his temper, or his tears. She doesn’t know which it is, now.

“Happy birthday, Clarke,” he whispers, and then he’s gone.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t sleep, and goes for a run at five in the morning.

Before, she remembers, she and her parents had lived in the house on the corner end of Wells’ street. It’s one of the bigger properties; she remembers her mother saying something about it being passed down through her family, even though from what Clarke can remember, they weren’t exactly hurting for money, either. This entire neighbourhood is filled with purely residential houses with the occasional gas station and grocery store – it’s quiet. Safe. Everyone living here shares the same interests – croquet and brunch on the weekends, discussing which Ivy League their kid is going to go to during tea, putting on airs about renovations and new jewelry. Everyone is privileged and they know it.

No one’s ever come right out and said it, but she knows it’s been something assumed, even by Thelonious himself who should know better, that she and Wells would be soul mates and get married and have children and, after his father passed away, move into his house and continue their croquet-playing, brunch-eating legacy.

Too bad that apparently things weren’t going to work out that way.

Unfortunately, she’s also being guilty of assuming the same. It’s something strange, having an entire future bizarrely planned out in her head and then, in the course of a single heartbeat, have it snatched away once more. The universe, coming all up in her face and frowning at her, saying, “Nah, darling, we’ve got something else planned.”

She remembers the hurt in Wells’ eyes all too clearly, and squeezes her own shut even as she concentrates on her breathing, the pounding of her sneakers on the pavement. It’s cold, this morning, and her breath comes in little white puffs.

And she still doesn’t feel sad. Guilty, yes – but only because she’d so obviously hurt Wells by something she couldn’t control. And if he can’t get over that, fine. It’s not like they were destined to end up together anyway, it’s not like they have to get along anymore.

She remembers her mother falling to the floor of her sunlit kitchen.

Maybe it’s for the best, then.

Clarke glances involuntarily down at the soul mate mark on herself. Brown, splotchy, ugly. She wonders who it would be to finally light it up pink, and finds herself dreading the day.

She runs.  

 

* * *

 

 

They leave on their graduation backpacking trip two weeks later.

Things haven’t settled. They’re still weird, and up in the air, and Clarke no longer has any idea where she stands with him. For eighteen years she’d been his best friend, his sole confidant, the girl everyone thought he’d end up with. The girl they’d both thought he’d end up with. Now, she’s – she has no idea what she is to him anymore, but she can still read him better than most and tell that he’s trying to forget it, put it all behind and carry on like nothing’s wrong.

But she can still read him better than most, and she can tell he can’t forget it. Maybe he needs time.

Or maybe this whole farce was just never meant to be. After all – it’s not like they have to get along anymore.

“We don’t have to, you know,” she’d said a week earlier, when he’d walked into her room and asked if she’d started packing yet. For some reason, she’d just assumed the entire thing had been called off. After all, the idea had started out as a celebration of sorts, ostensibly for their graduation from high school, but also for something else – but that had been before, and before was a very long ago. “I mean – I can explore the world anytime.”

And he’d held a hand up to his heart, pretended to swoon and be wounded by her words, the same Wells she remembers from her entire life, like that night and his tangible, palpable disappointment had never happened at all. “You’re forsaking me to the horrors of the world by myself? I thought better of you, Griffin.”

So she’d rolled her eyes and began to grab her things out of her closet, and he’d walked away humming and grinning. Like it was any other day. Like nothing had changed between them at all.

She can’t blame him. It had been assumed that they would get together, yes, and she’d went along with it, but somehow – she still can’t find it in herself to be depressed, or disappointed, or angry, the way he is. It’s almost like she hadn’t cared at all, but she knows she loves Wells.  _Still_  loves him, just not the way that matters. It’s strange. But if it had been her on that end of the line, hurting and bitter, she’d want to act like it hadn’t happened at all, too.

Right now, all she is is glad, that she hasn’t lost a friend and another family member to the soul mate mark.

Their first stop is in Prague because she’d been the one to plan out their itinerary and she’d always wanted to go. It’s something about the mysterious romanticism to the place that attracts her, although of course she knows next to nothing about Prague. She’d meant to do research, but then she’d assumed they weren’t going to after all, and, well. They can make do with guide books and brochures.

At least their hotel is booked. It’s one of the nicer ones, because Thelonious had paid for half their trip as their joint graduation presents, but it’s not until Clarke walks up to the counter and gives her name that she realizes she’d only booked one room. For all of the hotels, on their entire trip.

Too late now, she mentally sighs, and signs her name on the dotted line. They’ve been friends for almost two decades. They can handle it, probably, and it’s not like they haven’t seen each other naked before, or shared the same room, or even shared the same bed –

Clarke slams the brakes on that thought, puts on a smile and turns to Wells. “We can go up and dump our things first. And then I want dinner, because I’m starving.”

“Yes, your highness,” Wells bows, and grabs her bags for her.

He’s acting normal. She’s acting normal. Everything is normal.

 

* * *

 

They get about three hours to explore the city before the sun sets and everything turns dark and sort of terrifying, and now that she can’t hold his hand anymore she turns to him and says, “Let’s go back.”

His eyes slide away. “It’s kind of early, Clarke.”

Yes, it is. But they’re both avoiding something, and they can’t possibly keep avoiding it for however long it takes them to jaunt across the world, both looking for something they’d thought they already had. “I’m tired,” Clarke says, and she is, just not from walking and traveling.

“You were the one who wanted to go to Prague.”

Oh, okay. So they’re having this conversation, instead of –

“Fuck you, Wells, I didn’t ask for this,” Clarke shoots back, and hates herself immediately for it because the words don’t come out angry and sharp and cutting the way she wants them to, but they’re wilted around the edges, a little vulnerable.

“Clarke,” Wells begins tiredly, but she spins away and starts running.

Maybe she expects him to come after her, the way he always had, but she doesn’t hear footsteps. After a while, she stops, and there’s no one behind her, nothing she’s running from empty space.

She swallows her anger and her hurt, tells herself it’s nothing, he’s simply giving her space. Or maybe he wants the space for himself. Either way – she’s fucking lost in Prague and it sounds like an shitty premise to a shittier novel, but it’s not.

He’d always used to run after her.

This time, she has to swallow her tears and glances at the mark on her wrist. She wants to rip it off. She wants to cut it open and make it hurt like it had made her hurt for eighteen years, and it’s not fair, none of this is fair.

She forces herself to look away, and start the long hike back to the hotel.

 

* * *

 

**Paris, France. 2015.**

Clarke manages to find a hotel that doesn’t look too terrible or too nice an hour after she leaves the airport, and gets a room for three nights first, because she doesn’t know how long she’s going to be here, looking. She throws down her bag on top of the bed and goes in for a shower, and when she gets out, she no longer feels tired.

Instead, she looks out the window, and decides to get to work.

People give her strange looks on the street, because her mark is covered up. She ignores it all, sticks her hand into her pocket, and walks through the doors of the nearest hospital.

It only makes sense, after all. If her mark is still flashing and hurting, he must be hurt or dying. And any sane person, when they’re hurt or dying to that sort of degree, would check himself into a hospital. Right? Probably. Hopefully.

Asshole soul mate, she curses in her head, and ducks behind a bunch of chattering interns to sneak into the ER.

She doesn’t know how it’s going to work, but if she finds that asshole, his mark will have to light up to match hers, won’t it? Together, their marks would turn pink. That’s the way it always goes in the lectures she’s heard, and she’s even seen it happen once, in person. So in the hurried buzz of activity in the ER, she finds the first bed on one end of the room, and yanks back the curtain.

The clipboard hangs at the foot of the bed, and she gives it a cursory glance even as she looks automatically towards the wrist. She can read French better than she says it or understands it spoken, so she manages to decipher most of it – Charles Fourier, 23 years old, in with a concussion and a probable –

And then the man starts seizing and vomiting blood and she has to duck away before the surge of residents engulf her. But she catches a glimpse of the wrist as she turns away, and, no – his is still dark and brown.

She moves down the first row of beds with no luck, and, well, this isn’t a very efficient system anyway. She has the entire world to scour, with no leads except that he would still look eighteen, and be in mortal peril. That’s not the kind of criteria she can hand over to the police, even in France.

Clarke decides to get lunch instead.

  

* * *

 

 

Dangerous situations, she tells herself. Look for dangerous situations.

Clarke takes a careful, calm bite of her sandwich. She’s sitting out on the pavement, shadowed by the weak afternoon sun by a large umbrella sticking out from the middle of her table. The table over houses a young woman in sandals and a sweater too thick for the fair weather, even if clouds seem to be gathering overhead. She’s absently smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of steaming coffee, tapping away on her phone.

When she turns to the side, Clarke glimpses her eyes and sees that she’s high as a kite.

Well. That gives her an idea.

  

* * *

 

 

Dangerous situations, she tells herself.

Asshole soul mate, she tells herself. She still doesn’t know if he (or she) warrants all of this trouble, but, well, she’s all the way over in France already. She’s not in the business of doing things by halves – which may be why she’s sitting on a street corner when it’s closer to morning than midnight, waiting for something that she’s not even sure will come, but in a couple of years’ time she’ll probably just chalk it up to sheer stupidity.

“Qu’est-ce que tu cherche?”

She looks up, and licks her lips. She knows what he’d said, and judging by the look on his face, the tattoos that adorn his bared skin, she’s come to the right place. Some things you just know, even after all these years.

Clarke smiles, braces herself. The things I do, she laments. “You,” she answers, before rearing back and punching him in the face.

“Bloody hell,” the guy swears in a singularly British accent. Perhaps he isn’t as French as she’d thought him to be. He holds his cheek and glares venomously, as if hoping she’d drop dead by the sheer force of his annoyance. “What the fuck, lady?”

“I’m looking for something very specific,” Clarke says, before she can lose her nerve. “I think you can show it to me.”

His stare turns incredulous. “Aw, shit. You didn’t think to ask me nicely before you punched me in the face?”

“Well,” Clarke begins doubtfully, and pauses. “No?”

He looks at her like she’s got brain damage. At this point, _she_ thinks she’s got brain damage. “What is it that you wanted?”

“I was hoping that after I punched you, you would knock me unconscious and take me back to – well, whoever’s in charge.” Clarke examines his expression. It’s been a long time since she pulled any of this shit, she’s out of practice, if she was even in practice in the first place. “Is that, um, possible?”

The man sighs.

 

* * *

 

 

“What is she doing here, Murphy?”

The man she’d punched – Murphy, then, who is now sporting a very fabulous shiner she can’t help but be the tiniest bit proud of – sighs and sticks his hands into his pockets in half-assed sulk. “She said she was looking for something specific.”

The man leaning against the wall of the alleyway Murphy had dragged her into narrows his eyes a little. “And what is that?”

Clarke’s heart moves to beat up in her throat, and she has to swallow very, very hard. Breathe in, breathe out. “I was wondering,” she begins shakily, “if I could come work for you.”

The man laughs in her face.

She frowns, a little. Maybe she hadn’t expected it to be easy, but she hadn’t expected it to be this _hard_ , either. Seventy-four years of upper-middle-class life has definitely spoiled her.

“I wouldn’t do that, boss,” Murphy says cheerfully, and points at the black eye that's coming in rather nicely. “She did this to me.”

The man stops laughing, gives her a speculative look, and introduces himself instead. His name is Marcus Kane, and he wants to know when she wants to start working.

 

* * *

 

So perhaps this isn’t the smartest decision on the planet earth, but whatever, it can’t be worse than all of humanity putting their entire lives on the line for a glorified birthmark. In the next week, Clarke moves out of the hotel and rents herself a shoebox apartment in the outskirts of the city proper, the only vaguely reasonably-priced place she can find, and changes her sleep schedule so that she can sell cheap drugs on dark street corners at scary hours at night.

“You sure you’re cut out for this, blondie?” Murphy asks skeptically the first time she’d gone in for her first haul.

She’d snatched the little plastic bundles out of his hand. “I used to be the one on the other side of the table. For five years.”

Murphy had looked at her, and snorted out a laugh. “Can’t imagine that. How old are you again?”

“Probably older than you,” she’d shot back, and stalked out of the rundown basement apartment they call headquarters.

“Hey, blondie –”

She hadn’t lied, though. Not a single word.

So she stands on the street corners leaning against the brick walls and sells to the kids that walk by and look at her expectantly through bloodshot eyes and baggy, ripped clothing. She doesn’t look at any of them too closely, obediently walks away if they start flirting, or if the lights start coming.

She knows how to do this. It comes back to her so naturally it scares her, and is almost glad when Murphy pops out of the woodwork and gives her a once-over that makes her think he sees her not as a human being, but a machine. A violent, powerful, drug-selling machine. His eyes don’t back down or give an inch, though, when he meets her gaze.

“You’re doing pretty well.”

“Like I said,” she answers tightly, and leans back, not looking at him.

“You’re good at it.”

“Yes.”

“You weren’t lying.”

“No.”

Clarke thinks that’s going to be the extent of their conversation, but then he asks, “What’s your name?”

She gives him a derisive look. “No.”

“Oh come on, blondie. You know mine. You probably know more about me than I do about you.”

“That’s true,” she agrees easily.

He pauses as if waiting for more, and than snorts. “Fine. No name, then, I’ll just have to keep calling you blondie. So what’s up with the bandage?”

Clarke’s eyes involuntarily shoot downwards, towards where the bandage still covers the majority of her right wrist. After the first few days, the insistent throbbing has mostly stopped, but it’s settled into a sort of dull, persistent ache, unable to let her forget its blasted existence.

“Nothing,” she says.

“That’s not nothing. If it’s nothing, why did you cover it up?” To his credit, Murphy doesn’t even sound goading. He sounds truly curious.

Clarke looks at him. “I will make you eat the drugs,” she says serenely. “All of it. And the plastic baggies as well. If you don’t die from an overdose, you most certainly will from ingesting the plastic. Shut up right now.”

He holds up his hands in surrender, smirks because he’s Murphy and can’t help himself, and strolls away whistling. She watches him go, and thinks: he’s right. She’s really not cut out for this, selling drugs on street corners. It might’ve been part of her life for a very long time, and she might know exactly what to look out for and how to act around the clients, but she’s really not cut out for it.

Still, though. Asshole soul mates, and all. Maybe he’ll come by one day and buy drugs off her. A girl can hope. The only reason she’d asked for this job in the first place is to get at the clientele, and nothing else. Drugs are as dangerous as it gets. She knows that much from personal experience.

 

* * *

 

**Prague, Czech Republic. 1959.**

“You know,” Clarke begins carefully, stepping out of the shower, “it doesn’t have to be like this.”

Wells doesn’t turn to look at her. He’s broken open one of the complimentary bottles of red wine, has poured some out into two glasses to let it breathe while she’d been in the shower. “Like what, Clarke?” he asks, and he sounds too tired for eighteen years old.

She wonders how long the both of them would have to remain at eighteen. That question had never even been a question, before.

“Like this,” she repeats, and strides forcefully towards him. She takes his shoulders, turns him around so he can face her. His gaze immediately drags down before racing upwards, and she bites down on her lip, because she’s dressed only in a towel and all this is calculated, but that doesn’t mean she’s not nervous. “Wells –”

“Don’t, Clarke,” Wells says, and turns away.

Her hands drop from his shoulders. She steps back, wondering why she wants to cry. “It doesn’t –”

“Yes, it does,” Wells spits out, and when he looks at her again, she rears back at the force of the rage and bitterness in his eyes. “Don’t you get it? Whatever we had – it’s over. It has to be over, Clarke. It may not matter to you, because you never loved me, but I can’t do this. It hurts too much, okay?”

It’s suddenly very hard to breathe. Clarke wants to remind herself to inhale, exhale, because obviously Wells isn’t going to do that for her. “I don’t – Wells, how could you say that, I love you –”

“Not like that,” Wells interrupts, his smile nasty. “Right?”

No, not like that. She doesn’t say it aloud, but apparently her silence is enough of an answer because Wells brushes a hand across his face. Now he no longer looks mean, just exhausted. He’s exhausted, because of her, because of the soul mate mark.

Those things shouldn’t even exist, and here it is, ruining her life twice in a row.

“I’m going for a walk,” Wells says after a long beat.

She nods, timidly.

He leaves. Clarke looks out the window, and scratches absently at the skin of her right wrist.

  

* * *

 

 

**Paris, France. 2015.**

“Jasper and Monty, meet our newest recruit. Blondie.” Murphy glances sideways at her, as if hoping for something.

She sighs. “Clarke,” she offers finally, and ignores Murphy’s sudden grin. “Not blondie.”

“That’s not fair,” Murphy argues. “They get a name within one second of meeting, and I have to badger you for more than a week?”

“Nice to meet you,” Clarke says to Jasper and Monty instead. Jasper is tall and lanky and wears goggles, for some inexplicable reason. He looks like he hasn’t combed in hair since his birth. Monty is shorter, his cheekbones high and sharp, giving him a look of ready alertness. His collar is pressed, his hair neatly brushed to the side. They’re polar opposites, but the way they grin at each other and then reach forward at the same time to shake her hand tells her they’ve known each other a long, long time – perhaps an entire lifetime, the same way it had gone for her and Wells.

Monty’s soul mate mark, she sees when she shakes his hand, is bright pink. Jasper’s is still brown and waiting.

Her is still bandaged. She might be more than a little bitter at her asshole soul mate, which definitely does not bode well for their first meeting.

“We’re the resident chemists,” Monty tells her cheerfully. He looks far too young to be in this business, but then again, so does she, probably.

“Yeah, we do the badass things,” Jasper pipes up eagerly. “We blow things up and –”

“We filter the drugs,” Monty interrupts. “Make sure they’re on grade, ready for consumption, you know. Sort of the hygiene squad in this operation.”

“Sometimes we take pills and crush them up and make new pills!”

Monty slaps a hand over Jasper’s mouth and grins angelically at Murphy and Clarke.

“That’s wonderful,” Clarke nods, more than a little amused. “Well. Carry on.”

“Let’s go,” Murphy mumbles, and pushes her out the door.

Another day, another street corner. Clarke blows out her breath, looks up at the polluted Paris night sky.

“Something on your mind, blondie?”

“You do realize you know my name now, right, dickhead?”

“Ah, but where would the fun in that be?”

Clarke resists the urge to slap his face, directly on top of the bruise that shadows his eye that is still not completely faded yet. Instead, she breathes. In, out, in out. Breathing is undervalued, she should know.

“Your soul mate mark,” Murphy says after a moment, quieter, somehow more subdued. “Do you cover it because you don’t want to know?”

Clarke frowns and glances sideways at him, caught off guard. “Know?”

“Yeah. Know who your soul mate is. I mean, sure, theirs will flash pink too, and then you’ll both know, but – I commend you.”

She’s missing something obvious. “Commend me?” she asks slowly. “I thought you hated me.”

“You punched me in the face one second after meeting me,” Murphy says reasonably, and she’d never thought she’d see the day when Murphy could be reasonable, but okay, fine, she gets where he’s coming from. She’d be pissed, too. “It’s not hate, it’s strong dislike, and it’s justified.”

“That’s – cool. I think.”

“But thing is, you don’t want that mark on you at all, do you?” He nods down at her wrist, and she instinctively sticks her hand into her pocket. He laughs. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. Like I said, I commend you.”

“Why?” Clarke presses, unable to help herself.

“That thing dictates most of our lives, whether we let it or not,” Murphy tells her almost wistfully. He looks up at the sky, as well. It’s creepy, how he’s seeming almost human in this moment. “We just – we let it tell us what to do, and it leaves us with no choice at all, doesn’t it? We don’t get to pick who we end up with, who to spend the rest of our lives with. Not unless you want to live forever, and let’s face it – immortality is overrated.”

Clarke takes a minute to process this. Then she says, “I’m seventy-four years old.”

“Fifty-nine,” Murphy answers immediately, and the both of them pause for a beat, there on the sidewalk, before continuing to walk by unspoken agreement.

“Those things suck,” he mumbles after another few streets.

Clarke closes her eyes, breathes, and thinks that it’s very strange she’s suddenly found something of an ally in Murphy.

 

* * *

 

 

**Singapore, Singapore. 1961.**

Their backpacking trip has gotten a little out of hand, probably. It’s been two years when it was only planned for the summer, and they’ve both deferred acceptances to prestigious colleges. But this – it’s good for them. It’s been two years, and now they can joke about going around the world looking for their soul mates. It’s good. This is good. It feels like they’re proper friends again. They’re not walking on eggshells around each other anymore, and maybe they’re never going to get back their old camaraderie, but this is at least closer than the bitterness of two years ago.

“Why is it so hot here?” Clarke asks the ceiling of their hotel room.

Wells comes out of the shower, towelling his hair dry. “You’re going to break the air conditioning if you set it that low, and then what are you going to do?”

“It’s like walking into a steam room,” Clarke continues as though he hadn’t spoken. “I’m serious. Doesn’t it?”

“Sure, Clarke. Are you going to get dressed or not?”

“Underwear is appropriate wear if it feels like beach weather all the time.”

“But we’re not actually at a beach. So get dressed, I’m starving.”

It happens like this: they walk into a restaurant. Their eyes meet over a crowded room. The rest of the world stops turning, especially for the two of them.

Clarke looks down and says, “Wells.”

Wells looks down as well, and when he looks back up, his eyes are filled with stars and miles away – actually, maybe just a few tables away, where the stunning girl sits with the rest of her dinner companions, also staring at him. “Oh my God,” he whispers, completely out of character.

Clarke grins, and pushes him towards her before going off to find the bar to order a drink or five.

 

* * *

 

 

Her name is Harper, she’s interning at a beach resort here, and she’s pretty and warm and endearing. Clarke dislikes her on principle, because no one is that perfect and also because it’s _Wells_ , and then spends the rest of the week learning how not to. She doesn’t know if it’s purely the soul mate mark at work, but the two of them seem to fit together, inexplicably.

“Be happy for me, Clarke,” Wells tells her one night, his eyes softer than she’s ever seen, softer than everything he’s ever given her. “This is everything I’ve ever wanted.”

It’s nothing she wants, this lack of freedom, but for Wells, it fits. She nods. “She’s nice.”

“She’s perfect.”

“Are you going to stay here with her, then?”

He frowns, for the first time she’s seen since he met Harper. “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask – but I need to go to college, first. And then maybe, afterwards –”

Yeah, soul mates do the long distance thing easily. It’s almost a non-issue. She looks away. “I’m happy for you,” she says robotically, and drains the rest of her drink.

“Clarke, are you okay?”

She forces a smile on her face, forces her fingers not to itch and probe at the scar on her wrist. “I’m happy for you,” she repeats. “It’s – it seems real, what you’ve got.”

“You’ll find yours someday,” Wells promises her.

“Yeah,” she says, and bites her lip before she can say something stupid like  _maybe I don’t want to_.

“You’re going to be fine.”

“Yeah.” _She promised_. But Clarke’s learning not to take words at face value, now.

 

* * *

 

**Paris, France. 2015.**

Clarke knocks into the dark-skinned, heavily-built man while walking up the stairs with the days’ load, and the two of them stop and stare at each other awkwardly for a moment.

“Er, sorry,” she mumbles, feeling like an idiot caught staring, and goes to inch past him so she can get started.

“Clarke Griffin,” the man says before she can so much as raise a foot, and she stops short.

“How do you know my name?” she demands. She’d assumed he was one of Kane’s, maybe doing deliveries like her on street corners, but perhaps –

“My name’s Lincoln,” the man tells her, ignoring her question. “You’re looking for someone.”

Involuntarily, Clarke glances down at the man’s bared wrist. His mark is brown, a shade darker than his own skin. So he hasn’t got anyone then, either. “So is half the rest of the world,” she says derisively, and wants to dismiss him.

Something in his eyes holds her still, though. “I’ve seen him.”

Clarke frowns. “That’s impossible. Even if you have – how do you know that he or she’s the one I’m looking for?”

“He,” Lincoln says steadily, in that frank, matter-of-fact way she’s learning he says everything. “I didn’t say where I saw him.”

Clarke takes a deep breath, and bites. “Fine. Where did you see him?”

“In a vision,” Lincoln says, and looks like he’d smile at this moment if his rugged facial muscles were capable of such movement. He sort of reminds her of Lexa, from too long ago, in that they both are intimidatingly attractive and apparently allergic to smiling.

Clarke stares. She can’t help it. “Excuse me?”

Lincoln shrugs. “It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. But he's not in France, and wherever you’re going, I need to go too.”

“Because you saw it,” Clarke clarifies doubtfully. “In a _vision_.”

“So you understand.”

“No, I really don’t.” Clarke keeps staring. “So, where am I going next that you want to go with?”

Lincoln shrugs.

“You’re a crap psychic,” Clarke blurts. “You know that, right?”

“I never said I was a psychic.”

“You have visions. Doesn’t that make you one, sort of by default?”

Lincoln shrugs some more. “I’m going with you when you leave. You’re going to finish early tonight, so I’ll go to your apartment and find you, and then we can make further arrangements.”

“My – how do you know where my apartment is?”

“I’m assuming you’re going to tell me,” Lincoln says, looking at her expectantly.

“Oh, so you didn’t see it in a vision?”

Lincoln furrows his eyebrows. “Why would I see your apartment in a vision?”

Clarke gives up. He’s clearly been breathing in drug residue for far too long, he must be a little off his head. “Okay, psychic. Come to my apartment, I’ll meet you here after I’m done, and then we can go back together.” She pauses, wonders if it’s exactly wise to invite a drug dealer back to her home, even if it’s a temporary home and she’s also technically a drug dealer. If he says he’s seen her soul mate, he may still be lying, but it’s at least somewhere to start. At least she has a psychic with her to help now, whether or not what he knows is accurate. At this point, she’ll take anything she can get. “By the way, why do you need to go with me?”

“Where your soul mate is, mine is as well,” Lincoln tells her. He holds up his wrist, and the brown mark upon it, for her examination. “See?”

“So you’re not going to murder me brutally in my apartment?”

“No.” He pauses. “Why would I do that?”

“It might just be the stranger danger ingrained in my brain since young that’s doing the talking,” she tells him, and continues on her way.

 

* * *

 

Later that night, Clarke invites him into her apartment and watches him hold himself awkwardly and struggle not to touch anything. “Sit on the couch,” she tells him, and smiles at the sudden relief on his face as he does so.

She leans against the wall opposite the couch, where she’d bodily ripped out the television that had come with the apartment when she’d rented it. “Okay. So, psychic, where are we going next?”

“I think we should head towards Asia,” Lincoln says. “The general direction. Maybe.”

“Your visions aren’t very specific, are they? Could you maybe ask for some coordinate points? That would be helpful. More than helpful.”

Lincoln stares at her blankly.

Clarke sighs, and goes for her laptop to book some plane tickets.


	2. said your name into the mirror three times

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from mirrors, by pvris
> 
> EDITED 28/6/15

**New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America. 1971.**

When Clarke gets to the city, the first thing she does is lock herself in a public bathroom and inhale a dose of the anti-anxiety medication in her purse. Then she forces herself to sit down on the closed toilet lid and breathe. She’s never had so much trouble breathing before, and she can tell it’s getting worse and worse.

Not good, she thinks, and clears her mind before she can start hyperventilating instead of suffocating.

It’s been a while since she’s gone home. After the backpacking trip she’d gone back to Boston with Wells, of course. He’d majored in entrepreneurship in college; she’d gone into pre-med, moved on to medical school, got a prestigious internship at the general hospital and moved up to get hired as a resident, and then Harper had come to see Wells, and things –

She didn’t know how Wells thought things had ended, but it had ended with her in his bathroom dressed in her favorite black dress for their dinner party, staring at the mark on her wrist and listing the ways she could get it off her skin.

But then again, she remembers when she’d been seven years old and already smart enough to want to claw it away, and that hadn’t worked, either.

Clarke stands suddenly. The pill bottle she’d forgotten she’d been holding rattles hard in her grasp, and she looks down at it, surprised.

So maybe she couldn’t get rid of the mark physically, but –

She throws back several more of the pills, dry, before she can lose her nerve. This isn’t a road she wants to be going down, she knows, but she doesn’t really want to consider the alternative, either. There are already smile lines coming in on Wells’ face, silver peppering through his dark hair, and she’s eighteen. She’s still eighteen. She doesn’t want to know how long it’s going to be until she ages again, and the way things are going, it’s going to be more than a while.

Maybe the universe had somehow messed up with her. Maybe she doesn’t have a soul mate. Maybe the mark on her wrist is fated to stay dark and ugly for the rest of time, reminding herself and the world of what she doesn’t have. Maybe she’s going to be eighteen forever.

She stashes the pills back into her pocket, steps out of the bathroom, and heads out.

She’s never been in New Orleans before. With the sun setting, the nightlife is breathing alive – the neon signs lighting up, advertising all the things she’s never wanted to try before. The music, spilling out of storefronts and open doors and even on street corners, buskers in bright colorful outfits trying to work up a crowd. She tosses a dollar at one, and moves on.

The pills working through her system are starting to make her feel lightheaded. A bit like she’s flying, floating, but when she looks down, her feet are still steady on the ground. She’s never really tried drugs before, but there’s a strange feeling bubbling up inside her, taking over, making the lights brighter and the people louder and she – she likes it. There is only the world, outside, calm and steady and under control, and she feels absolutely nothing inside.

Clarke steps into the bar, slides onto the stool and orders a drink. The bartender looks her up and down, and she gives him what she thinks is a winning grin; he nods and turns away to make it for her.

“You’re not from around here.”

Clarke turns. A man has occupied the stool beside her, dark hair flopping into his eyes like an invitation, charming, his cheekbones high and sharp. He looks like  _fun_ , and she wants to know more.

“Oh, yeah?” she asks coyly. “How’d you know?”

The man grins at her, open and wolfish. For the first time, she notices his pupils, blown open wide, and wonders if her own match. “Because you’re not having fun yet.” He reaches for her hand, and, fascinated with the feeling of his skin sliding across hers, like static electricity, she lets him. He presses something into the center of her palm, closing her fingers around it. “I’ll be seeing you around,” he breathes at her, and then he’s off and gone.

Clarke opens her hand. A bag of fine white powder stares back at her, all accusations and resentment.

She pauses for a moment, and then stashes it in her purse. It’s a precaution. A safety net. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be a habit. It doesn’t mean anything at all, she tells herself. Then she puts her hands around the cold glass that the bartender slides in front of her, and downs half of it in one go, trying to ignore how much her fingers are shaking. 

 

* * *

 

 

There are other people in her hotel bed when Clarke wakes up. They’re naked. She’s naked. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what had happened, even if she as zero recollection of last night, although really, she still wishes she could’ve remembered. She doesn’t like missing anything, having a blank space where a piece of the puzzle should be.

And, okay. Perhaps she doesn’t have zero recollection of _everything_ that had happened last night.

Clarke slides out of bed, and crouches down to rummage through the discarded pants on the floor. She comes up empty with the first pair, and with the second, she scoops out a tiny bag of fine white powder. She straightens, and tucks the bag into her own purse, next to the identical one the man at the bar had given her last night.

“It doesn’t mean anything at all,” she says aloud, and doesn’t manage to convince even herself.

 

* * *

 

 

**Flight from Paris, France, to Moscow, Russia. 2015.**

Clarke settles back into her seat and weighs the odds.

For all she knows, Lincoln could be a raging lunatic that’s going to kill her once she finishes paying his way across Asia. He’s claiming to be a psychic, for God’s sake, and if there’s not something seriously messed up about him, then there’s something seriously messed up that she believes him.

Still. It’s not like she’s got a better idea than traipsing all around the world by herself looking for that one person among seven billion others, and that stupid mark on her wrist is still hurting.

Asshole, she curses mentally. Why couldn’t she have had the movie happily ever after, like Wells and Harper? Wasn’t that something reasonable to ask for? It happened like that for the rest of the world, why couldn’t –

And then Clarke’s gaze flits sideways, to the large man occupying the seat next to hers, looking severely discomfited by the metal walls and the fact that they’re a thousand miles in the air. So, okay, it could be worse. She could be a psychic, haunted by visions of her soul mate and still have no idea where to begin looking.

“Have you never flown before?” she asks, half out of curiosity, half because the silence is getting oppressive. They’re in for a long flight and probably longer ones in the future because he’s a fucking useless psychic, they might as well start getting used to each other.

“No,” Lincoln says tightly, and his hands tighten around the ends of his armrests.

Clarke sighs. She reaches forward, into the compartment where all the in-flight magazines are stored. She opens up the safety booklet, even though the flight attendants had already gone through all of it with them before the flight had taken off – that had been an hour ago, and Lincoln had already been freaking out then. He hadn’t been listening. He probably needs a refresher course.

“Okay,” she says, and tries to keep her voice pitched as evenly as possible, “this is what happens if the plane lands on water. There are going to be exits here and here, so ours will be up there in front. Put on the life vest under your seat, and just go for it. And there are going to be slides that open down here, so you know, it’s going to be like a giant waterslide – have you been to waterparks before?”

Lincoln nods tightly. He still looks terrified, but also sort of confused now, like he has no idea why she’s going over worse-case scenarios with her when she could just tell him everything’s going to be fine. Clarke also has no idea why she’s doing it, but the first time she’d flown with her parents, she’d also been terrified. Her father had done this exact same thing – told her what to do if the plane landed badly, or on water, or if the cabin oxygen pressure suddenly dropped.

“Okay, so, water slide. And there are probably going to be those inflatable rescue boats waiting for us, and the pilots will have radios and shit, and we’ll get help there and they’ll get us back to dry land. So that’s what’s going to happen. And, okay, these oxygen masks –”

As she talks, she sees Lincoln’s white knuckles relax back, feels him settle more comfortably into his seat. She replaces the magazine after she’s done talking, and lets the air stewardess serve them both lunch. She has to admit, first class does have its perks, especially when it comes to airplane food – it’s light years better than anything she’s ever had on a plane before.

“Don’t get used to it,” she warns Lincoln. “I have money to spring for this now, but I have no idea what we’re going to do in Asia, or the kind of people we’re going to have to bribe. So any money you could add to our cause, that would be fantastic.”

“I have money,” Lincoln says mildly.

Clarke pauses. “Do you know what we’re going to do in Moscow? You _are_ the resident psychic.”

Lincoln puts down his fork, and frowns. “My visions don’t work like that, Clarke.”

Okay, fine, fair enough. But – “So what do they work like?” she presses. “If we’re going to work together and stuff, don’t you think I should know, so that I can help?”

He takes a moment to reply to that, furrowing his brow as though he’s deep in thought. “They’re like – flashes. Like when you look at something and it reminds you of something else, and it brings up a memory of that time before. It feels like I’m remembering something that’s already happened, and it comes in flashes, like déjà vu. That’s what my visions are like.”

That’s probably the most she’s ever heard him speak in one go, and she blinks, trying to process it. “You’re saying that your visions are memories,” she says slowly.

“No, but they come and go the way memories do. When something else brings it up, there they are. But they’re not memories.”

“No, they’re the future.”

“I’m not sure how accurate they are,” he confesses.

“Well, you know my name,” Clarke shrugs, and pauses. “How exactly did you see that, in your vision?”

“I saw our first meeting,” Lincoln says easily. “On the steps. We bumped into each other exactly like that, and I said your name.”

“Okay, but like, how does that work? Since you got my name from the vision but the vision was of our first meeting when you couldn’t have possibly known my name because you didn’t technically have the vision in your head, but –” Clarke cuts herself off. “It’s like a paradox, isn’t it? You’re ruining the space-time continuum, basically, with your visions.”

“They work,” Lincoln says matter-of-factly, like he defies basic laws of physics and time on a daily basis, which probably is true, with his visions.

“So how did you see Asia?”

“I saw my soul mate and yours, together,” Lincoln tells her. “They’re siblings. The girl is younger. I don’t know their names, but they were playing together, and it was someplace completely unfamiliar to me. Some things, they just feel right – like that they’re our soul mates, and that they’re in Asia. It’s more of a general impression, rather than fact.” He pauses. “He’s in danger.”

“I know.”

He nods down at her bandaged wrist. “Is that telling you that?”

“It’s been telling me that for a very long time. I’m worried that we’re not going to get there in time.”

“We will,” Lincoln assures her, and then looks like he wants to say something further. But all he does is look away, and pick up his fork again.

Clarke watches him eat for a moment, and then says, “I’m seventy-four years old.”

He nods, like he’d been expecting this. For all she knows, he could’ve had a vision of them on this plane right now, and could tell her exactly what she’s going to say and defy more physics laws. She’ll get over it someday. “I’m thirty-seven.”

Old, but not that old. It seems right. “Do you know how old they are?”

“No.”

She thinks about it for a moment. Asshole, she remembers, and decides to ask instead, “Have you lived in Paris your whole life?”

“I was born in Belgium. My family and I immigrated, when I was a baby. But I grew up in Paris, yes.”

“And you’ve never thought about leaving?”

“There wasn’t yet a reason to,” he shrugs. “These visions, they’ve followed me around my entire life. Sometimes they just give me a general insight into things, but I do listen to them. They told me not to leave, and I didn’t, and now I’ve met you, so I had no more reason to stay.”

Okay, that makes sense. It’s creepy, but it still does make sense, if those visions are indeed real. “And your family?”

“My parents died a year ago,” he says, as easy as breathing.

She thinks she understands a little more, now. “You saw them die. In a vision.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“I was sixteen.”

She nods slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on his expression. He still looks – not open, exactly, but sort of indifferent. Like he’s already over it. Maybe he is. Maybe all those years of knowing about his parents’ eventual demise had made things easier, she doesn’t know. “Did you tell them?”

“No.” He pauses. “You should know, these visions, they run in the family. That’s why I believe them, because my grandmother told me to trust them, and because my mother listens to hers as well. But I don’t think knowing that you’re going to die helps with the dying part, or even helps to avoid the dying part, so I kept it from them.”

“That – that must have been terrible. I am so sorry,” Clarke says, and finds that she’s not lying. To carry the weight of your parents’ deaths around like that, from so young, when he should’ve been worrying about his grades, and girls that he liked? It must have felt like a curse.

“It was meant to happen,” Lincoln says, and turns his arm so that his soul mate mark faces upwards. “Just like this, do you see?”

She definitely sees.

“That thing,” she says, “is going to ruin my life.”

He nods wistfully. “But there’s something very romantic about it, isn’t it? There’s someone out there for everyone.”

“And all we have to do is find them,” Clarke mutters, and sinks down in her seat.  _Asshole_.

“We’ll find them,” Lincoln says, unexpectedly, uncharacteristically softly.

She breathes in. “Yeah, I know. We’re going to be fine.”

 _She promised_.

 

* * *

  

When they land, she sends Lincoln off to get them a ride to a hotel and sits down on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the arrivals waiting area. The place is filled with people waiting for their loved ones, businessmen holding up placards. There’s the wash of foreign language, the intimate _difference_ of it all from everything else she’s used to.

She’s been to Russia, once. Like with Paris, she’d hoped she’d be returning under far better circumstances than the ones she’d gone under before. She’s never been to Moscow before, though, and even though she knows they have no time for sightseeing she does wish they’ll get to glimpse the city.

Moscow isn’t technically Asia, no. But Lincoln had only pointed eastward as a vague reference, and she’d figured, better be safe than sorry. They can carry on east from here, because she gets the feeling that they’re not really going to find anything here. She may not have Lincoln’s visions, but she does have some gut instinct. Gut instinct had brought her to Paris, to Lincoln, so maybe it’s worth listening to after all.

Clarke takes out her phone, and turns it on. The display flickers her twenty-percent battery life, and she sighs, before placing a call through to Raven. She doesn’t know what time it is over there, but Raven keeps weird hours, in between her job at the café and her Masters in mechanical engineering, so she’s hoping she’ll pick up.

The line rings, and keeps ringing. Clarke’s just about to give up and go to find Lincoln, call Raven another day, when it clicks and finally goes through.

“Clarke?” Raven’s voice is sleepy, but alert. There’s the roughness on the edge of it that tells her she’s just woken up, and Clarke feels a little guilty.

“Raven, I can call back another time –”

“No, it’s pretty close to morning and I won’t be able to go back to sleep anyway. How’s it going where – wherever you are?”

“I just got to Moscow from Paris about twenty minutes ago,” Clarke tells her. “I found – well, I didn’t find him. But I found a psychic.”

There’s a long pause, that tells her Raven’s questioning her sanity. “A psychic,” she repeats. “Do I need to fly to Moscow and beat you over the head with a wrench? Because I will. Honestly, Clarke –”

“I know, okay, it’s not ideal, but searching the world for a single person isn’t exactly ideal, either,” Clarke sighs. “I didn’t see another choice.”

“Okay, fine. A psychic.”

“Lincoln.”

“Great, Lincoln. Wonderful. And what did this Lincoln tell you about your soul mate?”

“He says that wherever mine is, his is, as well,” she says. “That’s why he’s helping me. He knew my name, Raven, before I said a single word to him. I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

“And that’s why you trust him,” Raven says, still sounding severely disapproving and like she’s already readying her wrench.

“I don’t –” Clarke blows out her breath, frustrated. “Look, I know it’s not the best idea in the world to go charging off with a complete stranger, but I – he’s my best chance right now. He knows things.”

“You sure he’s not just making things up and scamming money off you?”

“You’ll be the first I’d tell,” Clarke says dryly.

“As long as we’ve got that settled.” There’s a pause. “So, Moscow?”

“Lincoln said something about Asia. So we’re heading east.”

“East isn’t very specific, Clarke.”

“It’s more specific than the entire world.”

“I’ll give him that,” Raven says grudgingly. “You remember those boxing lessons I gave you a couple years ago, right?”

Clarke smiles. “It’s nice to know you’ve got my back, even thousands of miles away.”

“Damn straight, Griffin, I’m the best fucking friend you’ve got,” Raven says without missing a beat.

Clarke grins. Someone taps her on the shoulder, and she twists around to see Lincoln, gesturing out the doors. He’s secured them a ride, then. “Raven, I have to go now. Soul mate duty calls.”

“Right,” Raven agrees. “Go. Don’t get killed. There’s pepper spray in your bag.”

“There’s – what?”

“I took precautions,” Raven says, blatantly unashamed. “I can’t trust you to take care of yourself when you’re rushing off like that, can I?”

Clarke laughs. “I’ll call you later, Raven.”

“I’ll hold you to it, Griffin.”

The line goes dead. Clarke stows her cell phone back in her pocket, making a note to charge it the next time she gets the chance so she can call Wells to update him as well, and stands. “So?” she asks Lincoln.

“I’ve got a taxi, and an address,” Lincoln tells her, already herding her towards the doors.

Clarke scrubs a hand over her eyes, and for the first time feels the fatigue seeping in through her bones. “Alright. Today, we sleep. Tomorrow, we get going.”

“Do you know where to look?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that.”

Lincoln pauses. “Moscow doesn’t seem right,” he hedges. “It’s a bit … cold.”

Clarke nods. “But we’re not going to miss anything. So we’re going to look anyway, and then we can be off in a day or two if, you know, your psychic abilities are still on the frizz.”

“Frizz?” Lincoln asks curiously, and Clarke remembers that Lincoln is actually French. He hasn’t got an accent in his English, which makes her wonder where he’d learnt it, but he wouldn’t understand slang.

“Never mind,” she says instead, and yawns. “Let’s just go.”

  

* * *

 

**St. Petersburg, Russia. 1971.**

She wakes up with a pounding head, a dry mouth, and no recollection of the night before, the same way she’d been waking up too often lately; when she rolls out of the motel bed, finds her clothes discarded on the floor, and her face a mess of makeup and sleepless nights, she tells herself this needs to stop happening.

It’s probably not going to stop happening. Not anytime soon, anyway. At least there’s no one else in her room, this time around.

It’s a bit too hard to muster up the energy to walk to the bathroom right now, but her mouth tastes like ass. Clarke licks her dry lips, rubs off the last of last night’s lipstick, and reaches for the whiskey bottle on the floor. It’s lying on its side, uncapped, but thankfully it’s mostly gone anyway so it hadn’t spilled over.

She swigs it once, twice, burning away everything left in her head. It’s numbing medication of the strongest kind, a local anesthetic administered directly into her brain. It’s bleach, whiting out everything of no more consequence. It’s water spilled over her watercolor masterpiece, making the colors run together until it’s so much static noise.

Then Clarke reaches into the lining of her jacket, her fingers knowing exactly where to go, and washes the pills down with the last of the whiskey.

Maybe some people do this so they can’t function. But Clarke discards both the empty pill bottle and drained dry whiskey bottle and stands to get dressed, because she does this so she can function. She does this so she doesn’t have to see the mark on her wrist, advertising everything that has ruined her life and is still ruining it, even now.

Outside of the window, the sun is shining, a rare day for St. Petersburg in the throes of autumn. She reaches into her suitcase and pulls on a long-sleeved shirt anyway, and tugs the cuffs of it down over her fingertips. The gesture is automatic, an ingrained habit, now.

She doesn’t have to think about it, now. She hasn’t had to think about anything, in a very long time. She’d always thought too much; people had always said she had a gift for overanalyzing, overthinking, rational and logical to a deep fault – well, she’s not thinking now.

It’s better this way, she tells herself. She looks at her cell phone on the rumpled bed, its dead display. The last time she’d charged it, there had been thirty missed calls, twice as many unread texts.

It’s better this way.

Clarke walks out the door and doesn’t look back.

 

* * *

  

“What are you looking for?” the man asks her in badly accented English, when the sun has set and the wolves are roaming.

Clarke smiles her best seductive smile, leans closer. There’s at least a liter of alcohol in her system now, and she couldn’t be happier, couldn’t fly higher. Even as she curls a hand around the back of his neck to pull him closer, she notes the empty dark brown of his soul mate mark, the way the bruises line up so neatly on the inside of his forearm leading up to it, exposed after he’d shrugged off his leather jacket in the middle of their dance.

“I think I’ve found it,” she confides. The man smirks.

 

* * *

  

**Moscow, Russia. 2015.**

They spend the better part of the day on the go, checking out hospitals and walking the streets. Lincoln had still remained unconvinced they would find any trace of their soul mates in this city, and Clarke does agree with that, but she paid for the plane tickets so they might as well make use of them. Better safe than sorry.

It’s early, though, when they decide to give up. It’s getting dark outside and they’re both weary, neither of them quite caught up on the jet lag yet and exhausted from the day of legwork. So they end up meeting at the café across the street from the semi-respectable Lincoln had magically found for them, and they both order coffees and sandwiches and eat them outside. It’s a little too cold to do that, but Clarke zips up her coat and Lincoln seems unbothered by the cold, so they make do.

“While I was in one of the hospitals, I saw them bringing in a drug addict,” is what Lincoln chooses to open their conversation with. By all accounts, it’s still not the strangest conversation starter she’s ever heard.

Still, though, Clarke remembers Lincoln saying that his visions come like jogged memories, prompted by real life, and thinks she knows where this is going. She bites into her sandwich, chews leisurely, ignores Lincoln’s steady gaze on her.

“Oh, yeah?” she asks finally, when it becomes clear he’s not going to say a word until she does.

“Yeah,” Lincoln says. “And I saw you.”

“In a vision, I’m assuming.”

He nods, carefully. She’s starving, but he’s only picking at the crust of his sandwich. He must be really bothered.

“He died,” he says, after a momentary pause. “The drug addict.”

“Don’t tell me you stuck around to watch.”

“You’re not doing it anymore, are you?” Lincoln asks. So, yes, he probably stuck around to watch. Clarke would be concerned about his mental health if she didn’t already think he was a little bit crazy.

“No.” Clarke puts down her sandwich, fiddles with the edge of her coffee cup. “Look, Lincoln –”

“If it’s over, then I don’t need to know,” Lincoln interrupts impassively. He looks up at the sky. “It looks like rain.”

She doesn’t bite. “Because you already know?”

“I only saw a little glimpse of it, Clarke,” Lincoln says, almost gently. “There was – a man, in your bed. There was heroin. It was cold out, and even inside, you were shivering.”

Heroin. Then – “St. Petersburg,” she tells him. “First and only time I tried shooting up. I didn’t like the needles, so I never did it again.”

Lincoln faces her, and regards her evenly. “Do you want to know how I started working for Marcus Kane?”

Clarke blinks and leans back, surprised by the sudden change in topic. “Uh, no.”

“I was an artist,” Lincoln says quietly. “And I was looking for inspiration. And I thought, it would be just this once.” He pauses. “I got out of it eventually, but by then I was out of a proper job, and selling paintings on the street wasn’t going to pay the rent.”

“You asked Kane for a job?”

“Kane agreed to give me three months to get clean for real, and when I could stand being around those places again without feeling the urge, I started dealing for him. It was what I could get, and that was fine.”

Clarke takes this in for a moment. “So you know what it’s like,” she surmises.

He nods. “I know what it’s like.”

What it’s like, then, is the feeling of vulnerability and complete helpless. The constant itch beneath her skin, the way the only thing left on her mind is more, more, more. Good for some things, less brilliant for others. But it had been what she’d needed. The feeling of some semblance of control, even if it was a downward spiral. The feeling of knowing exactly what she’s getting, with nothing left to fate, something that can’t be controlled.

“We should eat faster, get a good night’s sleep,” she says. “Our flight out to Beijing takes off tomorrow morning.”

  

* * *

 

 

**Bucharest, Romania. 1971.**

Clarke meets Lexa the same way she’s been meeting too many people these days: in the grimy bathroom of a grimier bar, an exchange of money and drugs.

The other girl has long dark hair that looks like it hasn’t been washed in twenty years, but somehow she makes it work, black and leather framing a thin face, deep-set eyes awash in smudged eyeliner, smokier than the cigarette between her lips.

“Have fun,” Lexa tells her, her voice pitched low and husky, her English awkward and accented. It sounds like she’s just woken up. Clarke knows, intellectually, that it’s more probably because she smokes a pack a day, but can’t quite find it in herself to care.

“Do you want to join me?” she asks on a whim, spur-of-the-moment, and lets her eyes drag very obviously down the line of Lexa’s body.

“I just might,” the other girl says, sticks her cigarette in between Clarke’s lips, and slips away.

Clarke breathes in smoke and exhales smoke, staring after Lexa’s retreating figure. It’s the first time in a long while that she’s breathed so easily, and she can’t help but think something must be said about bad habits.

 

* * *

  

Exactly like she’d expected, Lexa is the one who finds her next.

She’s on her way back to her motel after a night out that’s becoming startling typical for her. There had been too much alcohol, as per usual, but she’s still managing to stay upright, so that’s something. She’d nicked a cigarette off one of the men that had come to chat her up, because she’d wanted to know what it was like. She’s still smoking it as she stumbles out of the bar, and then a very familiar voice interrupts her quiet darkness.

“I didn’t think you smoked. You didn’t look the type.”

“I didn’t,” Clarke agrees easily, and grins. Alcohol makes her happy these days. It’s fittingly ironic. “You’re a terrible influence.”

Lexa snorts softly at that. Her expression is guarded, controlled; Clarke kind of gets the feeling that she’s never done this before, never approached a strange girl in the middle of the night looking for something specific, not even when Clarke had so obviously offered it in the first place.

“Want some of this?” Clarke asks, trying to ease the tension in Lexa’s shoulders.

“No.”

“Oh.” Clarke pauses, and takes another experimental puff of the cigarette. “Do you want me to walk you home, then?”

“I want to walk home with you,” Lexa says, boldly as her eyes, and stares back at Clarke, all daring and bravado.

Clarke shrugs. “Alright, then.”

“You don’t sound very excited about it.”

“Neither do you,” Clarke points out reasonably.

Lexa pauses. “I’ve never done this before.” She looks at Clarke. “You have.”

“More times than I can count,” Clarke agrees. “But none of it means anything.”

“Does it ever?”

“Do you want this to mean something?”

Lexa shrugs. “I want to walk home with you,” she repeats, and keeps her eyes focused on the road ahead.

Clarke can already tell that Lexa’s going to be nothing like she’s ever had before. There have been girls, women in her beds, but Lexa is – different. She holds herself up too straight, like she’s scared if there’s even a slight human curve at her waist whatever she’s supporting on her shoulders will come crashing right down. The makeup around her eyes, streaked and exhausted, looks like warpaint. Her face, cutting and sharp and beautiful, is wielded like a helmet, a spear, armor.

If Clarke’s being truthful, Lexa reminds her a little of herself.

“Then we’re going to go back to my motel,” she nods. “It’s up in the street ahead. Not much to look forward to, though, I should warn you.”

“That’s okay,” Lexa says immediately, almost automatically. After a moment, she adds, “So where are you from?” in a vaguely forced manner.

Clarke’s not offended. She gets the feeling that Lexa isn’t very adept at social interactions at all, and at least she’s still talking and not looking down her nose at her. “Boston,” she says freely. “Ever been?”

“ _America_ ,” Lexa says, with something like an air of disgust. Clarke immediately likes her unconditionally. “No thanks.”

“Snob,” Clarke throws back at her with no real inflection behind it. When she glances sideways to check Lexa’s reaction, there’s something of a smile on her face, which surprises her. She hadn’t taken Lexa for the smiling kind – or maybe she doesn’t do it very often. “Are you Romanian, then?”

“Ukrainian,” Lexa replies. Really, Clarke should’ve seen it coming. Lexa has the awesomest bone structure on anyone, ever, that she’s seen, and she’s seen a lot. Slavic roots make sense.

“I have awesome bone structure?” Lexa repeats, a little incredulously.

Clarke blinks. “Oh, did I say that aloud? I meant to keep it in my head.”

“But … I have awesome bone structure?”

“Of course you do. Have you not looked in a mirror recently?”

Lexa takes longer to ponder this thought than Clarke expects. Finally, she says, “You have excellent bone structure, too.”

This is the weirdest foreplay ever, Clarke thinks. “Thanks, I guess,” she says, and then points at the motel they’ve stopped in front of. “In there. Are you sure you want to do this?”

There’s a pause. And then, “My sister says I should get out more,” Lexa says, with obvious distaste.

Clarke laughs aloud, bright and cheerful. Lexa looks stunned, like she’s never made anyone laugh before. “Come on, let’s go to my room, then. I’ve still got the drugs I scored off you earlier, if you’re into that kind of thing.”

“I’m not,” Lexa tells her, sharp and staccato like her cheekbones. Oh, Jesus, those cheekbones. If Clarke wasn’t already bi, she thinks she’d definitely go gay for those cheekbones.

Or maybe that’s just the numerous tequila shots talking.

“Don’t you deal them?”

“I do. But I’m not.”

Clarke shrugs, and stumbles into the elevator. When Lexa enters, far more gracefully than her, she jabs the button for her floor. “To each her own, then. You can teach me to smoke cigarettes, and we can talk about bone structures.”

“That’s not really why you invited me up, is it?”

“Nah, but we can work up to that part later.” Clarke taps her cigarette; ashes float down to the carpet of the elevator, and then it dings and the doors open and she drops the entire thing altogether.

“I can learn to be,” Lexa says after a beat.

Clarke turns around to frown at her. The alcohol has addled her brain, she thinks. It’s like trying to function with foam wrapped around her limbs. “What?” she asks stupidly.

“I can learn to be,” Lexa repeats, and clears her throat a bit. “I mean. If you’re into that, then I can try to be.”

“I think that’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Clarke says, and grins some more.

 

* * *

 

 

Lexa’s soul mate mark is dark brown and wanting. It had been the first thing Clarke had noticed, when she’d handed over the drugs, slipped Clarke’s money into her back pocket. The second thing, of course, were her cheekbones, because those things had been sculpted to be noticed.

 

* * *

 

They spend the rest of the night curled up on Clarke’s shitty motel room bed learning about each other. It’s not the kind of night Clarke had imagined when the other girl had stuck her cigarette between Clarke’s lips, but afterwards, she thinks it’s the kind of night that actually matters.

Lexa teaches her how to smoke, and blow heart-shaped smoke rings. Clarke teaches her how to snort cocaine, and between the two of them, the little bag of white powder is gone before too long. Then they spend the rest of the hours until sunrise intermittently smoking and drinking some of the cheap whiskey Clarke had stashed away in her suitcase, and talking.

Talking. Actually  _talking_. Clarke hasn’t done that in – far too long, if she has to think about it.

Most of her other interactions with people thus far have been sex, or flirting to get a free drink or two, or drug dealers. Lexa is not – she’s still one of the above, but the fact that they’re talking is certainly something scary and strange and new all by itself.

“Anya,” Lexa says, when Clarke prompts her about her sister. She blows a smoke ring that dissipates in the air above them. Clarke watches the wisps of smoke, shadowy in the closed curtains. “Her name’s Anya. She’s five years older and still acts like I’m a baby.”

“She thinks you haven’t got a life, then?”

Lexa’s shoulders freeze up. They do that a lot, Clarke observes, when they get to a subject that she finds too touchy. Like why she’s here in Romania, all the way from Ukraine. She hadn’t talked about that, either, just redirected the subject around to her childhood in Ukraine, carefully avoiding the landmine.

“She doesn’t know anything about my life,” Lexa confesses after a moment, when Clarke’s just about to change the subject once more. “She doesn’t know – what I do. She still thinks I’m with the ballet.”

Clarke swallows, because she knows all about double lives and lying to the people she loves the most. “You dance ballet, then?”

“I do.” Lexa shakes her head; her thick hair falls into her eyes. “I did. I started when I was young, and then I just kept going with it, because it was something I was good at, something that I could do. Anya – she thinks I moved here because I got a principal position at the ballet company here.”

It wasn’t the reason she’d moved. Even drunk and high, Clarke can read the subtext clear as day. She can also read Lexa’s body language clear as day, which is why she says, “I can imagine you as a dancer. You’ve got the body for it.”

Lexa relaxes, ever so slightly. “And the bone structure?” she asks, the closest thing to a joke Clarke’s heard her say all evening.

“And the bone structure, that goes without saying. Is it still, like, a thing now? Or can you not do it anymore?”

“I could do it,” Lexa agrees. “Just not in this room, at this moment. It’s too small.”

“I’d love to see you dance one day.”

Lexa looks back at her, her eyes suddenly soft, even if her pupils are blown open wide. “Maybe you will.”

It sounds too much like a promise. The way she remembers, promises don’t usually end well.

Clarke rolls off the bed and goes to look for more cocaine.

  

* * *

 

 

**Beijing, China. 2015.**

“I don’t think there’s anything waiting for us here.”

“Should we go?”

“Let’s check the hospitals first. Like you said.”

“Maybe we should go looking for local gang triad types. You know, keep our bases covered.”

“Clarke.”

“You know, Lincoln, you really should learn how to make jokes. It’s this thing that humans do, sometimes, to stay sane in stressful situations, diffuse tension, that sort of thing.”

“I meditate.”

“I do not even have a single clue where to begin to respond to that.”

 

* * *

 

 

**Bucharest, Romania. 1971.**

Lexa is a bad influence. Clarke had known that the first time she’d set eyes on the girl, and the impression had only become more and more reinforced the more she gets to know her. With Lexa, she drinks more. She takes more drugs, because after that first night, Lexa is hooked as well. When sex comes into the equation, they fuck, all the time, and there’s no other way to put it. They smoke when they’re high, and once, when the both of them are short on funds, they break into an apartment together and steal all the money hidden under the bed’s mattress.

Lexa makes her do the things she’d never thought herself capable of, and not in a good way.

So Lexa is a bad influence, but Clarke hadn’t really known exactly how bad until she’d woken up in a hospital bed in the middle of the city with no recollection of how she’d gotten there, with an IV in her wrist and handcuffed to the metal bars of the bed.

“Fuck,” she mutters to herself, rattling at the handcuffs, and a shadow moves in the side of the room. “Lexa?”

Lexa comes into light, her face shadowed and haunted. Her wrists are loose and skinny, too skinny. Clarke wonders if she herself looks any better. “I’m sorry, Clarke,” she whispers, and her gaze darts over to the door.

“What? Sorry for what? Why am I handcuffed? What’s –”

“I’m sorry. I have to go,” Lexa interrupts urgently. “I’m so sorry, but you’ll be fine, you’re going to be fine, I have to go –”

And then she’s gone, just like that, no proper goodbye or explanation at all, leaving Clarke with nothing but a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

The police come in, after a while. This is what she learns: she’d been found when the police had raided the underground club that Lexa had taken her too. They’d been out for drinks with some of Lexa’s crowd, and when the police had come barging in, everyone had scattered. Except Lexa and Clarke hadn’t gotten away fast enough. They’d been caught. There had been more than two hundred grams of cocaine found on Clarke, given them reason to charge her with distribution, which would give her a longer prison sentence than if she’d simply be charged for usage.

This is what she puts together, in the middle of her charges being written up: Lexa had slipped all of her drugs into Clarke’s pockets, and when they’d been caught, surrendered easily. They hadn’t started using yet that night, so there would be no trace of it on Lexa, at least not without a drug test. Clarke hadn’t been conscious enough to protest when Lexa had been released without charges, putting all the blame on her.

The police eye her almost sympathetically as they tell her about her upcoming trial and jail sentence details. When they leave, Clarke closes her eyes and does the one thing she hasn’t done in more than a year: she picks up the phone, and calls Wells.

 

* * *

 

 

**Singapore, Singapore. 2015.**

Wells and Harper meets them at the airport when their red-eye flight lands at four in the morning. The first thing Wells says is, “You both look like shit,” and then he holds his arms out wide so that Clarke can step into his embrace.

“Fuck you too,” Clarke replies without missing a beat, and lets herself relax for the first time since she’d landed in Paris. Wells is warm and familiar, even if he looks far older now than what she remembers. Somewhat guilty, she also remembers that the last time she’d seen Wells in person had been at least two years ago. She’s a terrible best friend, she knows.

“It’s great to see you again, Clarke,” Harper smiles warmly, and Clarke lets go of Wells so she can hug Harper, too. They got a sort of friendly rapport going, after the wedding. They’re sort of friends now, Clarke hopes.

“Yeah, you two. You both look – good.”

Harper’s soft smile morphs into a wry grin. “Let’s tell it like it is, Clarke. We’re old, and getting older.”

“Yeah, well,” Clarke shrugs, and returns the grin, feeling more at ease with each second that goes by in their company. “You age well.” She’s not lying, Harper really has. She still has the grace and gentleness in her features, even if her hair is thinner now, brushed with grey. Wells has gotten thinner, but he looks no less distinguished.

“And is this Lincoln?” Wells asks, turning to observe the man standing quietly behind Clarke. She’d called him in Beijing, given him an update, introduced Lincoln to him. His reaction had been much the same as Raven’s, but the fact that Lincoln hasn’t yet killed her in her sleep has to stand for something.

“Lincoln,” Clarke says, and he steps forward automatically. He and Wells immediately begin to size each other up. “This is Wells, and Harper. They’re – well, they’re friends. You can trust them.”

But Lincoln’s eyes are no longer trained on them at all. Instead, they’re flitting around the airport terminal, looking for something elusive. He frowns, suddenly. “It’s not here, either,” he tells Clarke.

“I’m sorry?” Harper asks, looking thrown.

Wells puts a hand on Harper’s elbow, and looks at Clarke. “Even if they’re not here, you should at least stay for breakfast, get some sleep before you go off again, you both look like you need it. Besides, you’ve come all this way, and I’ve been badgering you to come visit for ages.”

Clarke hesitates, and looks at Lincoln. The other man is still frowning, looking off into the distance, but his eyes are red and his posture is terrible and there are growing bags beneath his eyes. She can bet she isn’t looking much better, if at all. “Alright,” she decides. “We can stay one day. Lincoln?”

“Of course,” Lincoln agrees immediately. “They’re your friends, you should catch up.”

Harper’s still frowning. “Who’s not here?”

Wells hadn’t told her, then. “It’s a conversation for a meal, I think,” Clarke says, and rubs her eyes. “Wells?”

“Right this way,” Wells says, and leads them out to his car.

 

* * *

 

 

Despite the breakfast plans, the first thing Harper does when they get into the two-storey semi-detached home in one of the busier parts of the city is make up the couch and guest room for them. Lincoln offers to crash on the couch, and before Clarke can protest, he’s already slumped down across is, out like a light.

Clarke climbs the stairs, yawning, thinking about a nap. She wakes up with the light slanting in through the windows wrong, and when she gets back downstairs looking for a shower, the clock display on the living room wall shows it’s early evening already.

Harper glances up when she enters the kitchen and smiles, immediately stopping whatever she’s making on the stove and going to pour her a glass of water. “Have a good sleep?”

“Excellent,” Clarke agrees, and sips at the ice-cold water. “Thanks for – everything.”

“Nonsense. It’s only expected. If you wait half an hour, dinner will be served.”

“I was actually hoping for a shower.”

“Oh, of course. First door on the right upstairs, there should be towels in there. And if you need a change of clothes –”

“That’s alright, I’m good.” Clarke pauses, watches Harper flit around the kitchen. “But, really. Thanks for doing this. I know it was really short notice, and neither of you know Lincoln.”

“You know I’m always here if you need anything, Clarke. Even if you just need to talk.”

Okay, and that’s a prompting if she’s ever heard one. Clarke sips a little more at the water, and then sighs and rubs her temples with her fingertips. “I don’t know. It’s just been a long couple of days. It’s only been a few weeks, but it feels like so much longer.”

“I know. Wells told me – about the soul mate thing, and later, about Lincoln.”

“His visions?”

“Yes. Those.” Harper slips a lid onto a huge silver pot and goes to sit opposite Clarke at the kitchen island. “Clarke, I just wanted to let you know –”

“That you think I’m a huge idiot and should never have trusted him?”

“No,” Harper says, surprisingly forcefully. “That I think you’re doing a good thing. Soul mates – they don’t come easy, and they’re once in a lifetime, quite literally. Wells and I, we’re the real deal, but we still fight. A lot. About the stupidest little things. And if there’s anything I’ve learned over my long, long, life, it’s that even the things that come easy, you have to work for. So I think you’re doing the right thing, the good thing, and I want to let you know that before you give up.”

Clarke smiles wryly. “You think I’m going to give up?”

“I think you’re exhausted, and it’s hard calling the shots alone,” Harper says gently, and pats her hand a little. “I’m here for you, Clarke. Wells and I both. I’m truly glad you decided to come.”

Clarke pauses. “For the longest time when Wells first met you,” she says carefully, “I was jealous of you.”

Harper sighs. “I know.”

“Was I that obvious?”

“A little.” Clarke gives Harper a look. “Alright, a lot, then. But I wasn’t bothered.”

“Because you knew you were his?”

“Because I knew him, and then I got to know you, and it’s true that he might’ve loved you once, and that you might’ve learned to love him back, but the two of you would never have worked. I can’t quite describe it, but your soul mate must be something spectacular.”

“Spectacular, huh,” Clarke sighs. _Asshole_.

“It may feel like your life is being dictated to you, but once you see him, you’ll know,” Harper tells her quietly. “I looked at Wells, and I didn’t even need to look down at the mark to tell that he was going to be it for me. Soul mate marks, I don’t think they create love. I think they just tell you what you would already know anyway. Streamline the process, in a matter of speaking.”

“Really?”

“When you find your soul mate, you’ll know. You can choose not to be with him, after all, even with the mark. You can choose to turn away. But I think there’s a reason no one ever does.”

That makes sense, Clarke realizes. “I’ll give it a shot,” she says aloud.

“Please do,” Harper smiles, and then stands to go check on her pot. “Spaghetti and meatballs sound good? I thought comfort food ought to be on a menu, at a time like this.”

“Spaghetti and meatballs sounds wonderful,” Clarke says fervently.

 

* * *

 

  

“Where to next?”

“The Philippines.”

“Wow, you’re giving me an actual country this time?”

“We’re close. I can feel it.”

“Like, metaphorically, or through your visions?”

“ _Clarke_.”

“What?”

  

* * *

 

Wells sends them off at the airport in the morning, after dinner and another night’s sleep. “Remember to call, and visit if you can on your way back,” he tells her, when they’re hugging again. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too. And I promise I will.” She smiles. Maybe promises aren’t so bad after all.

 

* * *

 

“We’re here,” Lincoln says, the moment they walk out into the arrivals terminal of the airport in Manila.

Clarke frowns, and swings around to look at him. “How do you know?”

Lincoln points straight ahead, at a figure cutting through the crowds directly towards them. “That’s her.”

And then the figure comes to a stop in front of the two of them, her hair braided intricately, fire in her eyes, in the way she holds herself. Her soul mate mark, and Lincoln’s, blazes alive the moment their eyes meet, but neither of them react. “My name is Octavia Blake,” she says with a voice like razors and ice. “You’ve kept me waiting long enough.”

“Sorry,” Lincoln says apologetically. Octavia looks him down haughtily.

Clarke can only stare in disbelief.


	3. we can fall into each other now

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't know how to write action scenes i'm sorry i'm working on it.
> 
> still needs to be editing and revised, lots of holes that have to be patched up. 
> 
> special thanks to captainofthesass for keeping me alive and talking about everything with me, you're the bestest.

**Paris, France. 1983.**

Wells picks her up after her stint in Romanian jail, and then deposits her in an apartment in Paris. Clarke would feel abandoned, except, well – she wants to be alone right now, and Wells probably gets that. She needs time to think, to process, and –

Most of all, she needs time to get clean.

Rehab is something she and Wells had discussed, in detail over the phone, when she’d first got to Paris and found everything set up perfectly for her – the apartment, the furniture, kitchen stocked and ready. But in the end, she doesn’t go to that first session, and cancels her registration the second time they call.

Instead, she goes out once in the first week, to buy art supplies, and then spends the next month locked up in her apartment, painting, sketching, cleaning, learning how to cook, keeping her mind off things. She doesn’t go out; she gets groceries delivered to her house, and even if she accidentally sets fire to a few things early out, she gets the hang of this making food from scratch thing.

She’s sort of proud. Self-sufficiency at long last, after forty-two years. Better late than never, after all.

Wells calls, once or twice. She doesn’t pick up. She does occasionally text to let him know she’s still safely on the straight and narrow, but besides that, she doesn’t pick up. After a few times, he seems to get the message and keeps their communication to a minimum. He’s only trying to help, she knows, he’s always only trying to help.

Some things, though, are just meant to be done on her own.

Clarke’s always liked art. But her mother had been a doctor, and from young she’d taught Clarke that she wanted to be a doctor, and well, it had just sort of gone from there. But she’d taken several electives in art during high school, and then a minor in art history in college, and she’s rediscovering how much she loves simply creating, letting her mind flow. It keeps her mind from flowing into other, less favorable directions.

All in all, it keeps her busy, and her mind occupied, and it’s exactly what she needs. These days, she doesn’t even take medication for her anxiety before, because that had been her jumping-off point and she doesn’t need toxicity like that in her life again. When the attacks come, she sits down, and breathes.

Breathing also occupies her mind. It’s a good cycle.

After a while, Clarke settles into a routine. She gets up at seven, opens all the blinds in the apartment to let the rising summer sun flood into the rooms, warming everything up and shading things in creamy yellow. Then she takes a shower, makes something simple for breakfast; then she throws her hair up into a ponytail, and gets to work – sometimes a new sketch, sometimes an old painting. Lunch interrupts her work, and after that, she reads a book for as long as she can stand until her eyes get tired, and then she puts on music and runs five miles on the treadmill in her living room. Another shower, then dinner, more painting until it’s time to sleep at eleven-thirty.

Today, though, she’s not even halfway through the routine when Lexa comes knocking, blowing her precious, hard-earned peace into smithereens.

 

* * *

 

 

Clarke slams the door in her face.

The door’s too thin, though, so she hears all to clearly when Lexa sighs and scuffs her boots against the floor outside. “Look, Clarke, I get it. You don’t have to let me in, I just want you to hear me –”

“How did you find me?” Clarke demands, still staring at the closed door because she can’t tear her eyes away, not now, not even after everything.

“I – your friend, Wells – he said –”

Wells? Clarke squeezes her eyes shut. “Please go away, Lexa.”

“Look, I’m not looking for absolution. I just – it’s been years, and I need to apologize.”

“It isn’t about what you need.”

“No, but I think you need this too.”

“I really must disagree.”

“Clarke –”

Clarke locks the door, spins away, and goes to put on the loudest, angriest music she can find.

 

* * *

 

The next day, there’s an envelope on her doorstep, carefully printed with her first name and nothing else. It reminds Clarke – they’d never exchanged last names. They’d exchanged childhood stories, their entire lives, drugs and cigarettes, breathed each other in and spat each other back out – but not once had they mentioned last names. Maybe it should mean something. She’s too tired to contemplate deep metaphysical probabilities at this moment.

She hadn’t slept at all last night, waiting for that knock on the door, for that whispered word.

Clarke takes the envelope, holds it in her hands, and is suddenly filled with the urge to fling it over the railing of the walkway in her apartment building.

She takes it inside, sets it on the dining table, and makes breakfast. She takes it into the room she’d converted into a studio, and covers a new canvas with splashes of angry red and depressed blue. She takes it into her bedroom as she reorganizes her closet, throwing out the old, rearranging the new.

She takes it into the bathroom as she fills a bathtub with scalding hot water, tempers it down with some cold, and finally peels back the flap when she sinks into it like coming home.

Full circle, Clarke thinks wryly, and starts to read.

 

* * *

 

 

**Manila, Philippines. 2015.**

“Um, excuse me?”

Octavia looks at her in that you-are-a-piece-of-trash-and-I-am-a-goddess kind of way Clarke’s learning she looks at everything. “I saw you in a vision. I assume you did the same,” she says, and glares at Lincoln.

Lincoln looks about this close to bending down and kissing Octavia’s feet. He’s actually smiling, which Clarke has not seen once the entire time they’ve been traveling together. She feels sort of betrayed.

“You have visions?” she asks. “Like him?”

“How else did I know that you two were coming? I don’t come all the way out to the airport for just anyone,” Octavia snaps at them, and okay, she’s a little high-strung. Then the mark on her wrist throbs once, hard, and Clarke’s reminded that it’s her brother in mortal peril, if what Lincoln had said was right. She’s got the right to be a little high-strung, she supposes.

“Okay. Now we’re here. Where’s –”

“Come with me,” Octavia interrupts flatly, and then stalks away. Lincoln doesn’t hesitate to catch up, and as the two of them fall into step, her hand slips so easily and naturally into hers that it’s like they haven’t really just known each other for about twenty seconds.

Clarke shakes her head, and jogs a little to settle into step behind them. “Octavia, I’m sorry, but I need to know –”

“Take off the bandage,” Octavia tells her, and that makes Clarke do a double take.

“What?”

“The bandage on your wrist,” she repeats impatiently. “Take it off.”

Clarke does as told, almost numbly. Octavia points at the throbbing, flashing red. “That started happening around a month ago, right?”

“Around then, yes. I’ve been looking –”

“You’re in the right place,” Octavia tells her. “It’s going to be some time before it stops doing that, though.”

A sick feeling rolls into Clarke’s stomach. “What do you mean?”

“It means my brother is dying, and the two of you took your sweet time showing up here –”

Lincoln winces, shrinks back. Clarke explodes, leans forward. “Look, I don’t know what the hell your visions have been telling you we’ve been doing for the entire past month, but it certainly wasn’t taking our sweet time. Do you know how difficult it is to find a single person in the entire world? We’ve traveled across more time zones than you’ve lived years, you don’t get to stand here like I’m your enemy and judge me for something you don’t even –” Clarke cuts herself off suddenly, because the black swimming around the edges of her vision are migrating inwards, and she’s all too familiar with the symptoms.

Breathe, she tells herself, but she can’t, can’t get the air into her lungs, they’re as elusive as her asshole soul mate, can’t keep hold of anything, not even the ground –

“Breathe,” someone says, and then the pressure around her wrist increases, decreases, increases, a perfect pattern to time to her inhalations and exhalations. “Clarke, you need to –”

The black recedes, bit by bit. The pressure pulsates on, steady and calming and reliable.

_Don’t hold your breath. Don’t panic._

Her vision clears, and although her air still comes in ragged breaths, it’s coming, and it’s steady at least. She finds herself curled on the floor pressed against the airport wall, and Lincoln’s hands on her shoulders, him staring worriedly into her eyes as Octavia stands shock-still behind him.

She looks down at the wrist, and finds that her breathing coordinates perfectly with the steady flashing of the red of the mark. No one’s hands are around her wrists, keeping beat, keeping her in rhythm. It’s the soul mate mark that’s doing the work, this time around, and she doesn’t even know whether to be relieved or horrified. That’s one more thing it’s taken over, in her life, even if it’s because of that she lives to die another day.

“Clarke,” Lincoln says, and judging by the crease between his eyebrows, he’s been saying her name for some time.

“I’m fine,” she says automatically, and Lincoln’s shoulders relax. “It’s just – it happens, sometimes.”

“I know,” Lincoln says, his eyes unfathomable. Clarke wants to ask if he saw these panic attacks in her past or her future, and decides she doesn’t really want to know after all.

Octavia steps forward raggedly, and slips down cross-legged to sit on the floor with them. Up close, her expression softer, she is just as intimidatingly attractive as her soul mate. “I’m sorry,” she says, after a mild pause. “I shouldn’t have said that. But you have to understand, it’s been a month, and I don’t – I don’t know how much longer he can take it.”

She has visions, Clarke remembers. How much of her brother’s suffering has she seen? “It’s fine,” she says aloud, and rubs at her eyes. “We’re all on edge. We’re all exhausted. Just – tell us what we need to know, and have to do. Less sarcasm this time.”

Octavia chews on her bottom lip for a while. In this moment, she is neither brilliant, nor terrifying; she simply looks like a girl, scared for her brother.

“Let’s go back to my place,” she says finally. “And then I’ll tell you everything.”

 

* * *

 

 

Octavia’s place is located in the heart of the city, awash in life and humidity. It’s small, but there’s so little adornments and furniture that it seems spacious on the inside. She sits them down on the couch, and knocks around in the kitchen for a couple minutes before emerging with iced coffee for them all, as well as a little plate of unwrapped, pre-packaged sandwiches.

“Not much of a cook, sorry,” she says unapologetically, and then sits down on the armchair opposite them. She leans her elbows on her knees, and clasps her hands loosely together; a strand of hair falls out from its carefully arranged position behind her ear, and she smooths it back impatiently, which seems to be a running trend in her movements. “Okay, look. What do you want to know, first?”

“A name,” Clarke says immediately.

Octavia meets her gaze, and nods. “I’ll do you one better.” She reaches behind her, and grabs a picture frame off the mantle. It features two people, smiling, their arms thrown around each other. On is obviously Octavia, younger but just as pretty, long hair and dark eyes. The other is –

“Bellamy,” Octavia tells her, handing over the picture. Even without looking up at the other girl’s expression, Clarke can already hear the undertone of fondness and worry that lines Octavia’s voice as she says her brother’s name, the history of love and fierce protectiveness behind it. “Bellamy Blake. Born 1953. The moment he turned eighteen, his mark started flashing – much the same way yours is flashing right now, I presume.” She nods down at Clarke’s bandaged wrist.

Clarke’s free hand immediately goes to her right wrist, even as she examines the picture. She doesn’t know what she’d expected, but this man in front of her – his hair dark and curly, face filled with a sloppy, careless grin, seems somehow right. She frowns a bit. “Flashing?”

“Clarke,” Lincoln says quietly.

Clarke does the math. Octavia’s eyes narrow. “Oh,” she says finally. “Flashing.”

“I started having visions then, as well,” Octavia continues. “I saw you sometimes, in flashes. Bits and pieces. It wasn’t always clear, because you weren’t my soul mate, but you were my brother’s, and I think that helped some. I gave him places to look for you, you know. For that entire year after he turned eighteen, all he did was look for you.”

That year had been 1971. Clarke knows exactly why Octavia seems to hate her so much, now. “How much did you see?”

“Enough,” Octavia replies flatly, and turns away from her. Clarke sets the picture carefully on the coffee table between them. “He wasn’t successful, obviously. When he came back, he wouldn’t talk about anything that he found, or saw, and he went straight to join the police academy. Thought it would give him a better chance of getting into the places where you might be.”

“Was the mark – was the mark still flashing, after that year?”

“No,” Octavia says after a pause. “It calmed down, and settled back down into nothing in 1983. Paris, wasn’t it? I saw the streets, and the museums, and the art.”

“Paris,” Clarke agrees, subdued. So apparently the mark went both ways – telling him when she was in danger, telling her when he was. Too bad it couldn’t conveniently tell the other where they were, as well. If only he’d found her in 1971. “You said his mark was flashing then, and you know – you know what was happening to me then, so what about –”

“Tell us what’s wrong,” Lincoln says gently, cutting off her increasing agitation. His hand comes up to rest on the inside of her elbow for a brief moment, steadying her, before moving away again.

Octavia takes a deep breath. “My brother,” she says, her voice like razors, “has been taken by the Mountain Men.”

“The who?” Clarke blurts.

Octavia smiles thinly at her. “And they want you next.”

 

* * *

 

 

**Paris, France. 1983.**

Clarke,

            I know you don’t want to see me. I wanted to see you, because I thought this conversation might go over better face-to-face, and I’ve never been very good at expressing myself in the written word. You can say whatever the else you want to say about me, but I do want to respect you and your wishes, so I’m going to stay away and say whatever I need in this letter. You can read it, you can throw it away, you can burn it, but I’m looking for closure and I really do believe you need this too.

            The day after I left you in that hospital, I met my soul mate.

            That seems like the worst irony of all, doesn’t it? I thought we could work for the longest time. It’s been decades for the both of us, and it’s hard waiting for something so abstract. We’ve talked about this, in length. I truly did believe I could make you it for me. We could’ve been something good. I know I ruined that, and now I can’t even be sorry I did, because then I wouldn’t have met her. Costia.

            I don’t know what anyone else has told you about what the soul mate mark is like, but it’s – it’s more than otherworldly. It’s when you look at someone and know you don’t have to try. And that’s the way love should be, I think, if it comes then it comes and you don’t have to pretend what’s there is more than anything that it is. With Costia, I knew what I was going to get, and maybe the same amount of work would have to go into that as with any other relationship, but I knew we could make it through anything. When you find you soul mate – because that’s a when, not an if, I know that now – you’ll see. You’ll see her, or him, and then you’ll just know. The soul mate mark doesn’t even matter from that point onwards, because you don’t need something physically tangible to tell you something you can already feel, in your heart.

            You’re expecting an explanation for Bucharest. I don’t have one for you. All I can say is that I’m selfish, and everyone has a self-preservation instinct. You could say that I never loved you. I still don’t know if I did. I don’t know if you loved me, either. I don’t know if what we had was love or not. But in the beginning, I didn’t think you were that serious, and I know I hurt you in more ways than one, but this is truly for the best.

            I could say I’m sorry for framing you, for leaving you, for never caring about you the way you thought I did. But I would be lying. If that makes me a bad person, then so be it. I can say that I’m sorry for hurting you, though, because whatever else I meant to do, that was the one thing I never set out to do. Framing you was wrong. Leaving you alone in a foreign country like that is quite possibly one of the most despicable acts in my entire life. Never caring about you makes me a callous bitch.

            Hurting you makes me less than human.

            So I’m sorry about that, most of all. I’m sorry you had to know me, and care about me, and then get hurt by me. I hope that in the future, you’ll meet so many more people worthier than me to spend your heart on, who will care for you much more than I ever managed to do. I hope that in the future, you’ll forget me, meet your soul mate, and live a far happier life than the one we would’ve had together.

            May we never meet again.

           -Lexa.

 

* * *

 

 

Clarke spends the next three days sketching Lexa’s face on a canvas, then filling it in oil paints. When Lexa starts staring back at her from the canvas, fierce and bright and sharp, colored in shadows and slanted light, she takes that, and the letter, and burns them both.

Closure, she thinks, and doesn’t feel the least bit better.

 

* * *

 

 

Afterwards, though, she steps foot out into Paris for the first time since she’d got here. She finds her way to the Louvre, because even if it’s a tourist trap, she’s still never been. She wanders around the crowded halls, spends seconds in front of the famous pieces and minutes in front of the lesser-known ones, and when she finally finds herself back where she’d come from, she sits down and calls Wells.

“Hey,” she says, when he picks up.

“Hey,” Wells says, and then laughs, startled and bright and relieved.

 

* * *

 

 

**Manila, Philippines. 2015.**

“I think you’re going to need to explain everything to us, from the top,” Lincoln says, and Octavia nods.

“No one else’s soul mate mark has ever flashed like that before,” Octavia begins. She nods at Clarke. “I’m sure they told you much the same thing, when yours started.”

Clarke thinks back to her collapse outside of the coffee shop, the hospital afterwards. “Something like that,” she agrees.

“So Bell started asking around, asking if anyone knew what it meant. He was still determined to find you, even after that year, and he knew it meant something like you were in danger but he wanted to know if had other meanings, if somehow it could tell him where you were. He wanted to know if the bond between the marks could be tapped into, to communicate in ways other than just, you know, danger warnings. And like I said, he joined the police force, and after that he had access to other sorts of materials, you know, to continue his research.” Octavia pauses. “He wanted to be a history professor.”

History professor. Clarke tucks that little piece of knowledge away – she’s been looking for so long without a clue, she’s just greedy for more.

“Eventually, he asked too many questions, and other people got curious. They started asking questions back.”

“The Mountain Men,” Lincoln says.

“Yes, exactly. They got wind of what happened, and they wanted to know more. And Bell didn’t get out fast enough.”

“When was this?”

“A month ago,” Octavia says, and smiles faintly. “Clarke should know.”

Clarke does know. She rubs at her wrist, absently.

“They’re experimenting on him,” Lincoln says, keeping his eyes fixed on Octavia’s. “I saw needles. And water.”

Clarke’s head jerks around so fast to Lincoln that her neck cracks. “You saw – what?”

“You didn’t need to know,” Lincoln tells her. “We were already on the plane over here. There was nothing you could’ve done.”

“The visions get clearer the closer you get,” Octavia says. “Have you noticed?”

Lincoln nods once, briefly.

“I only saw your face properly about two hours ago,” she adds, looking to Clarke. “When you were on the plane over, I’m assuming.”

“So the visions, they work like a kind of proximity thing?” Clarke asks quickly, trying to put all thought of torture – God, it probably _is_ torture, with the way the mark’s been flashing like that non-stop – out of her head. “Like, you know, metal detectors, their beeping speeds up the closer you get –”

“That ought to be useful,” Lincoln agrees, with a sort of finality.

Octavia shrugs. “It could be. But he’s my brother, and he’s not far. My visions are clear. I know where he is.”

“Then why haven’t you –”

“The visions,” Octavia interrupts, “have always included the both of you. I was waiting. For this entire month, I’ve been waiting, because it wouldn’t work without you.”

“Okay,” Clarke says, nods frantically, tries to remember to breathe. “Okay, fine, so now we’re here, what do we do?”

“The circle’s not yet complete,” Lincoln says suddenly.

Clarke frowns. “What? We’re not casting spells or summoning demons, why do we need a circle?”

“He’s right,” Octavia says. “We’re still missing a few more people. If we’re going to get my brother out of there, we’re not cutting corners. We’re not missing a single step.”

“Like I said, why do we need a circle?”

“Because of the visions,” Octavia and Lincoln both say at the same time, scarily in sync. “I trust them,” she says, after a beat. “I know what we have to do, so you should trust me. There’s no other way it can go down.”

“Fine, whatever. Who else do we need?”

“Jasper and Monty,” Lincoln says, “and your friend Raven. How fast can they get here?”

 

* * *

 

 

It takes everyone a day to fly over and gather in Octavia’s apartment; introductions are ingested, alongside food and explanations. Raven’s eyes are bloodshot from the traveling and jet lag, but the hug she envelops Clarke in is crushingly hard anyway. “You scared me,” she tells her seriously.

Clarke smiles, pulling away. “I missed you.”

“You’re terrible at keeping in contact. You realize that?”

“I was a little busy,” Clarke says, and her eyes drift over to Monty and Jasper, hanging out behind her, taking in the scene. “I’m sorry I called the both of you over at such sort notice. I know you don’t know me very well, and this is a lot I’m asking of you, and I just want to tell you both how grateful I am that you’re here.”

“Well, if you’re paying for first-class plane tickets,” Monty says, obviously trying to lighten the atmosphere. “Besides, this is about your soul mate, isn’t it? You said as much over the phone. We’re not complete bastards, we’ll help.”

“Could be dangerous,” Clarke warns. “If you want out now, I’ll –”

“That’s alright,” Jasper says cheerfully. “Didn’t you say you needed people to blow stuff up?”

“That’s not technically in our job description,” Monty says warningly, looking at Octavia and Lincoln as though scared they’re going to bust the two of them. “We, uh, we –”

“Make drugs!”

“We’re pharmacists,” Monty interrupts loudly.

“I already know you make drugs,” Octavia says, looking vaguely amused. “That’s fine. We’re going to need you to make special ones, though.”

Clarke looks at Octavia. “Do you already know how we’re going to break Bellamy out? You said that the Mountain Men were holding him in some sort of facility, I have no idea how we’re going to get inside.”

“For that matter, why aren’t we leaving all this up to the police?” Raven asks, glaring. “Why are you lot all risking your lives when there are actual people trained in hostage extraction?”

“The police won’t help,” Octavia says, glaring right back. “The Mountain Men, they’ve untouchable. The police have been trying to get at them for years, but they’ve got people in high places and resources in higher places. Bellamy will be long dead by the time they’re of any help – it’s faster to do things illegally than it is legally, over here.”

“The Mountain Men,” Monty repeats. “Could you, uh, explain that for the people in the back?”

“Basically Kane’s drug ring, except with less drugs and more human experimentation,” Clarke explains quickly. “Octavia –”

“I don’t know how we’re going to get Bellamy out, I didn’t see that,” Octavia answers. She looks sideways at Lincoln, who shakes his head, as well. She sighs a little. “But now that we’re all here, and I know what each of you can do, I’d love to start hearing some ideas.”

“Raven’s a mechanic,” Clarke says slowly, and looks at Raven.

“No,” Raven says immediately, starting to shake her head frantically. “No, no, no, no –”

“You could kill their security, make it easier for us to go in –”

“Abort, Griffin, abort right now, I really don’t like the direction your thoughts are going in –”

“And Jasper and Monty can blow things up,” Clarke finishes. “That’s basically a plan, right? Sort of?”

“That’s a plan that’s going to get us all killed,” Octavia tells her flatly. “You don’t know what the Mountain Men are like.”

“Thank you!”

“But we can certainly work on it.”

“What?”

 

* * *

 

They sit down at the table together, and over the next five hours or so, Octavia outlines for them exactly who the Mountain Men are, where Bellamy is kept, and what is not going to work. And then they talk about what is going to work, Lincoln stares off into the distance moodily, Raven protests each step of the way, and Jasper just wants to add as many explosives as possible into the mix.

The Mountain Men, Clarke learns, are more than just Kane’s drug ring with less drugs and more human experimentation. Perhaps they started out that way, smuggling firearms and people across borders, trying to get as rich and powerful in the criminal underground as possible, but in recent years they’ve started expanding into the areas of genetic modification. Over the years, they’ve accumulated a net of connections and settled their members into high government positions, so they’re kept off the police’s radar and safe whenever something untoward about their organization comes to light. On paper, they’re now a billion-dollar corporation in the field of medicine and agriculture. They’re untouchable. They’ve hurt too many people to count.

“Bellamy was working on their case when he was captured,” Octavia explains. “I mean, the police and government aren’t completely idiotic, they know the Mountain Men need to be stopped. There have been too many missing persons cases connected to them, and they still do a little drug and firearms trafficking on the side. But they’re – it’s not going to work, the way they’re getting at it. All the cases ever compiled against them have mysterious disappearing witnesses and evidence. They’re too powerful, and they’re everywhere.”

“We’re not looking to take them down completely,” Clarke reminds her. “All we’re looking for is a way to get Bellamy out.”

“I want to take them down completely,” Octavia says. “If we’re going in there anyway, then we might as well do some good for the people.”

“That complicates things,” Raven says.

“It doesn’t have to,” Lincoln says abruptly. “If we get Bellamy out, the rest will follow. He will get other hostages out. You’ll have witnesses, a case to bring them down.”

“Did you see that in a vision?” Raven asks wryly. Clarke sighs.

“No,” Lincoln says mildly. “That’s simply common sense.”

Octavia barks out a laugh, the first Clarke’s heard out of the girl. She’s sitting side by side on the sofa with Lincoln, their arms just barely brushing together, and Clarke thinks – yes, maybe the soul mate mark isn’t so bad after all.

Her wrist throbs suddenly. _Asshole_.

“The best thing for it would be to get in and out of there as quietly as possible, in as little time as possible,” Monty tells them. He looks up from the rapid blueprint sketch of the facility Octavia had presented them with, at the beginning of their meeting. He and Jasper had been examining it all through their conversation, with whispered exchanges and furrowed brows. “I just don’t see how that’s possible, because if what Octavia says is right, then where the hostages are being held is right down in the middle of the compound, and underground as well. There’s just no way you’re going to get that far in without setting off more than a few alarms, even if Raven can manage to shut some down. It’s just – I’m sorry, but I don’t see a way.”

“We could blow up everything,” Jasper suggests, but even he sounds a little depressed now.

“I don’t think total war is going to work in our favor, seeing as how we’re outnumbered and Bellamy would be inside the thing we’re blowing up,” Octavia says dryly.

There’s a pause. And then Raven says, very reluctantly, as though she thinks she’s going to dread saying anything at all, “He doesn’t have to be.”

Lincoln straightens abruptly. Monty frowns, and then looks down at the blueprint. A slow smile blooms over his face. “That might just work.”

 

* * *

 

Afterwards, Raven pulls her into the kitchen, away from where everyone else is still sketching out the plan, and hikes up her sleeve.

“Fuck,” Clarke blurts at the pink where the brown had used to rest, a bright mark on her wrist. “Raven, when – who – why didn’t you tell me?”

“There wasn’t a good time, with you running all over the place,” Raven shoots back. She lets her sleeve fall back over her mark, and her expression softens. “The thing is, Clarke, I wanted to show it to you because either we’re all going to be dead tomorrow, or you will because he is. And I – I don’t want you to regret anything.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you still have a choice,” Raven says, keeping her eyes level and fixed on hers. “I’ve made mine, and I don’t want to see you make the wrong one.”

“You think I’ll leave him, after all of this?”

“Yes, I do. And if what you want is control over your life, then give him a chance. It doesn’t mean you love him, the mark. It only means that you could. That’s a choice, Clarke, and it’s important, and I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“I don’t think it’s a choice.”

“Because you’ve never let yourself see it as anything but law,” Raven sighs. “You think in black and white, don’t you think I’ve realized that by now? But this mark, it’s not either, it’s grey. It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t let it. You don’t have to be obligated to be with him, but you don’t have to feel like you’re giving in to some higher power if you do, either. It’s love, Clarke, and love is always a choice.”

“Raven –”

“Tomorrow. After tomorrow, if you still think differently, then we can talk.”

Clarke hesitates, and then nods. “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

 

**Paris, France. 1985.**

Slowly, Clarke puts her life back together.

She goes for runs, in the morning, circling around blocks and streets until she feels like she can breathe properly again. Afterwards, she finds coffee and breakfast at a café down the street from her house, then goes grocery shopping. For lunch, she throws together whatever new recipe she’d found off the Internet that week, and then in the afternoons she goes to her volunteer job at the local children’s art center, teaching little kids how to fingerpaint.

In the evenings, she works on her own artwork, and then eats something for dinner before a shower, going to bed. Rise, rinse, repeat.

She doesn’t look at her soul mate mark anymore. She’s stopped waiting for the day, she no longer wants to know. Love is one thing; eternal love, obligated love, surrendering control of her heart – it’s completely different, and if she has any say in it, it’s not happening to her. Not now, not ever again.

 

* * *

 

 

**Manila, Philippines. 2015.**

Octavia breaks them into an empty apartment in a prime vantage spot near Mount Weather, which is apparently the Mountain Men’s hideout. It’s basically a butt-ugly warehouse-type thing, large and ugly and concrete, and it looks like a fortress on the outside.

“Records say it’s just storage space for their shipments and things,” Octavia tells them distastefully, as she strides around the apartment yanking the blinds closed and flicking on the fluorescent lights overhead. “But, you know.”

“We know better,” Raven mutters, and glares at the couch. “Are you sure we should be in here? Who’s apartment is this?”

“No one’s,” Octavia says, and gestures at the kitchen table. “Monty, Jasper, you can go set up in here.”

“Well, as long as we’re taking down a criminal organization, we might as well add breaking and entering into the list of charges,” Jasper says cheerfully, and then he and Monty disappear into the kitchen.

“Octavia –”

“It’s no one’s, really, the previous owner died half a year ago,” Octavia says.

“And … how do you know your way around this place so well?” Clarke asks suspiciously.

“It’s not my first time here.” Octavia sits down heavily, and then sighs when Clarke and Raven continue staring at her expectantly. “Okay, look, it took you and Lincoln a month to get here. You couldn’t ask me to just sit around doing nothing, could you? How do you think I know the layout of the place so well? The guard rotations? The rosters of people on duty?”

“You got all that from just sitting here and observing?” Raven asks skeptically.

“It was a lot of observing. But it’s all over with now, and Bellamy is still inside, so would you all please sit down and we can get started?”

“Octavia, we’re going to get your brother out,” Lincoln says quietly, and moves to sit beside her. “I’ve seen it.”

“You have?”

“Yes,” Lincoln says without blinking, but Clarke hears the slight hitch in his voice, the bump in the word. She narrows her eyes. Lincoln glances at her in warning, as though knowing.

But the tension leaks summarily out of Octavia’s face, and she settles back into the couch. “That’s – we’re going to be careful anyway. We’re going to do this right.”

“Of course,” Lincoln agrees calmly.

Raven frowns a little bit more, but finally sits down on the floor and starts taking things out of her backpack. “Okay, I couldn’t find communication devices on such short notice, we’re just going to have to make do with Bluetooth earpieces and cell phones. Everyone will each get one, and then Jasper and Monty will have to go in first, get into position. It’s on the outer periphery, so I don’t see much trouble with that first part. The moment they’re done releasing the agent into the air supply, they are out of there.” Raven raises her voice a little. “IS THAT CLEAR?”

“Crystal!” Monty calls back, and then there’s the ensuing sound of a scuffle that tells everyone else he’s having to muffle whatever Jasper’s trying to say in response to that.

“Don’t try to play the hero, just get your ass back here,” Raven yells, and then clears her throat. “So, after that’s done, we start the clock for fifteen minutes, which is both enough time for them to notice what’s happening and to start moving people out from the underground, which is where they’ll be affected the fastest and quickest, and up into the upper levels. Now, as we know from Octavia’s plans, there’s only one real way up there unless you count the maintenance tunnels, which are too small for mass transport so we’re ruling that out. And that’s where I, and the rest of us, come in.” She pauses. “Yes?”

Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t hold your breath. Don’t panic. Everything is going to be fine, everything is going to be –

“Clarke?”

In, out –

“Oh, shit, this happened at the airport – Lincoln, do something –”

Her wrist starts pulsing again, as though on cue. The rhythm is steadier than her heartbeat, so she paces her breathing to that instead, forcing her air in, out, in, out as calmly and evenly as possible. Her vision, and then her brain, clears. She’s on the floor again, this time with Raven in front of her instead of Lincoln – but her eyes aren’t on Clarke’s.

They’re on the exposed wrist of her right arm, the bandage having somehow come off in the middle of her panic attack. “Clarke,” Raven says, her voice pitched strange. “That’s – why is it doing that?”

She looks down, and finds her mark breathing with her. In, out, in, out, with every pulse and flash of pink. Pink, not red, this time. Clarke doesn’t want to think about what that means.

“That’s why the Mountain Men wanted you, too,” Octavia says quietly. “Your marks are unorthodox. It’s like you’re saving each other, every single time. Other people don’t have marks that tell them their other is in danger. Other people don’t have marks that remind them how to breathe.”

“That’s seriously,” Raven begins, and then cuts herself off, shaking her head. She pats Clarke on the shoulders. “Remember to breathe, we can’t do this without you.”

“I think I kind of got that. This happened at the airport, too,” Clarke says, and rubs at the mark. It doesn’t feel any different – slightly raised, throbbing, painful. As she watches, the pink fades back into red, settles back into its continuous, sporadic ache, instead of the steady pulsing just a few seconds before.

“We should get going, there’s not much time until sunset,” Lincoln says, breaking into the sudden silence.

Raven busies herself with her equipment once more. “Right, okay, I’m just going to outfit Jasper and Monty first.”

“I’m going to make coffee,” Octavia mutters, and follows Raven into the kitchen.

Her hand still closed around her mark, Clarke tells Lincoln, “You didn’t see the happy ending.”

Lincoln sighs, as though he’d expected this to come. “No, I didn’t. But, Clarke –”

“You shouldn’t tell Octavia the truth.”

This gives Lincoln pause. Clarke wonders when she’s ever going to say something surprising enough to make Lincoln react in any other way except by pausing, and creasing the space between his eyebrows slightly. “I shouldn’t?”

“No,” Clarke nods. “She needs this hope. She needs to believe.”

Lincoln looks at her consideringly. “And you don’t?”

“I believe that I will do whatever it takes, and I hope that it will be enough,” Clarke shrugs. “I don’t need a happy ending, Lincoln. However way it ends, it will end.”

“I hope you get one anyway, Clarke.”

Clarke smiles. “Thanks, Lincoln. I hope so too.” She’s beginning to see what Harper had meant by _trying_.

 

* * *

 

 

“Time to go, Jasper, Monty.”

“Good luck.”

“If we don’t make it back, I want one of you to call my mother and tell her I love her, and that the one time I told her I was going to stay at Monty’s house and do our chemistry project we were actually breaking into the school science lab and –”

“We will honor your names as valiant heroes,” Lincoln say solemnly. “Now go forth, brave soldiers, and conquer.”

Jasper beams, sketches out a bow, and drags Monty with him out the door.

Octavia raises her eyebrows at Lincoln, amused. “He needed it,” he says, as mildly and impassively as ever, and goes to drink the coffee Octavia had made for everyone, extra-strong and black.

Clarke sits down on the couch and goes over the equipment Octavia, and then Raven, had handed over to her. They’re supposed to be ready to go in the moment Jasper and Monty signal that they’ve released their newly developed chemical agent into the underground air supplies through the ventilation areas on the outside of the compound. Raven will stay behind, start the clock, man everything from behind the scenes; it’s her, Octavia’s, and Lincoln’s jobs to go in and make sure everyone gets out alright, and that no one is left behind.

Raven had given her an earpiece; Octavia had given her a gun. She feels the weight of both in her hands, hard and meaningless without her behind it. She slips on the earpiece, zips up her jacket, and stands to put her hair into a ponytail.

“Are you going to be alright?” Octavia asks her, her voice pitched a little lower than usual. Raven is sitting at the coffee table and keeping an ear and eye out for Jasper and Monty, her brow furrowed in concentration, ignoring everything but the live feed on her laptop screen coming from the camera clipped onto Monty’s collar.

Clarke jerks around to look at Octavia. “I’m fine.”

“Your panic attacks, do you have medication for those, or –”

“I don’t take medication anymore,” Clarke says. “It’s fine. It’s handled.”

“Like you handled the two previous ones? You have to remember to breathe, Clarke, no one can afford you losing it in the middle of this –”

Clarke swallows down the sarcastic, biting reply that threatens to surface. “Like I said, Octavia, you don’t have to worry. I’m fine. Lincoln says everything is going to be fine.”

There’s a brief, tense pause. Octavia opens her mouth as though to reply, but then Raven freezes and says, “Monty?”

“We’re here,” says Monty, voice crackly through the extended line. “Locating the ventilation pipes –”

“Good, that’s good, that looks right,” Raven says, relief bleeding into her words even as her eyes flit around the screen, looking at whatever the boys are looking at. “Just stick the canister into the – yes, pull the – got it. You’ve got it. You’re home free, boys, come on back.”

“Time to go?” Lincoln asks, materializing in front of them.

Octavia nods. She casts one last lingering look at Clarke, and then turns to stride for the door. “Let’s go.”

The entrance they’re taking to get inside the compound is through the side gates where shipments are unloaded in the mornings, on the opposite side to where Monty and Jasper had dispersed their gas. It takes fifteen minutes for them to start feeling the effects proper, and to start mobilizing. That gives them a window of thirty minutes, just about, to get into place. They’d chosen not to go in until Monty and Jasper were done, to avid detection until the last possible minute, to give them as much time to work as possible.

They don’t know how long it’s going to take, for them to get everyone out safely. There are going to be casualties, definitely, trying to escape through so much security, and the one thing they don’t know how to calculate is how long it’s going to take. Raven can run interference for as long as possible, but once she gets shut down, that’s it, they’re on their own inside.

“So everyone remembers what to do, right?” Octavia asks, as they approach the gates. There are two security guards in the little tower next to the entrance, smoking and basically not paying much attention to them.

“The plan’s rather simple, Octavia, I don’t think it needs going over again,” Clarke says testily.

“I wish we had a truck,” Octavia grouches. “Would make this part so much easier –”

“We haven’t even considered all the possibilities,” Clarke says tightly. “What if the prisoners are sedated? How are we going to move them all, then? What if –”

“There are too many what-ifs to consider,” Lincoln says tiredly. “If we can’t move them all, then we move Bellamy. It’s that simple, Clarke.”

“But, ideally –”

“Hey! What are you three doing –”

Lincoln is the one who reacts first, spinning around and summarily knocking out one of the guards with a punch to the neck. He goes down like a rock. Behind the first, the second is already reaching for the radio in his belt, and Clarke starts running towards him, because he can’t radio, he can’t tell anyone yet, they have to at least get inside first before the alarms start ringing –

Octavia picks him up and throws him against the side of the wall. He makes a mild muffled noise and his head lolls over, out like a light.

“Where did the two of you learn to fight, again?” Clarke asks, her heart racing.

“I was in a drug ring, Clarke.”

“I did some illegal underground boxing for a while,”  Octavia shrugs. “Won a lot of money. It was during my rebellious phase.”

“Rebellious is one word for it,” Clarke mutters, and they move on.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s not really a backup plan. There’s not even a real plan at all, really, besides getting them to move people into a place easier to intercept than the glorified dungeons where they’re being held.

But there can’t really be much of one anyway, because everyone knows plans fall apart the minute things start happening.

Clarke’s still not entire sure how true that saying is, but right now they’re creeping through ventilation shafts like they’re in some sort of movie, and, okay, motion sensors are the easiest things to turn off and they’re trying to make Raven’s life as easy as possible until they can’t anymore, so she gets it, but honestly, she feels like she’s suffocating.

The adrenaline pumping through her veins probably isn’t helping. She keeps her mind focused on her breathing instead, because despite how Octavia had put it, it’s true, her going off and having a panic attack in the middle of everything is definitely not going to be good for any of them. So instead of thinking about what she’s going to have to do next, she breathes. In, out, in, out –

Octavia, behind her, taps her on her thigh. She reaches forward and catches Lincoln’s sleeve, so that he stops as well. Octavia points down into the little gap between the vents, where they can see a sliver of what’s happening below them.

Clarke’s breathing speeds up, and she has to take a moment to calm herself down. In, out, in, out, like the rhythm once again pounding from her soul mate mark, like Bellamy knows that she needs it, and, maybe he does. As she watches, she sees him pass by below, which means they’re in the right place. Raven has directed them to the right place, they’ve remained hopefully unseen until now, which means he’s relatively safe for the moment, despite everything else that had happened before.

There are seven of them, she counts quickly. All mostly conscious and walking of their own power, surrounded by guards on all fronts, rifles pressed up against their chests. Seven prisoners, seven hostages being experimented on for whatever reason.

The sick feeling in her gut builds and builds, alongside the dread and the terror and panic, but she’s breathing. She’s breathing, and that’s all that matters until Bellamy.

Octavia nods at her, and then positions her gun. She mouths one, two, three –

And then she empties her gun into the ventilation shaft, sending all three of them crashing to the ground directly on top of the guards and the prisoners alike. It’s nothing that’s going to kill them, but Clarke severely hopes that whoever they’d landed on were knocked unconscious to give them less people to take out.

There’s a roar of confusion and panic; Clarke takes a breath, and then she fights.

She has little experience in fighting at all, even with those boxing lessons Raven had given her, early in their acquaintance. But there’s the element of surprise on her side, along with Lincoln and Octavia, and when the prisoners realize what’s happening they join in as well.

The fight is a blur for her; all she remembers is glimpsing Bellamy’s face, expectant and relieved, through flying limbs and confused yells, and then suddenly, she can breathe again, far easier than she’s ever done before.

“Clarke, what the fuck, watch your back!” Octavia yells at her through the fray, and she turns around, jams her gun into the guy’s knee, and pulls the trigger. She looks up, sees the oncoming guard, furious and ready to kill, and she – she springs into action. The movements she forces unfamiliar muscles into are strange and foreign but it’s like she knows exactly what to do, her instincts telling her exactly what to do, when to move sideways and duck and punch and fire her gun.

This is something different, she realizes, as she knocks out another guard and turns to face the next. This isn’t her.

This is _Bellamy_.

The revelation makes her smile, the steady throb of her heartbeat and her soul mate mark spurring her on, and she fights.

 

* * *

 

 

“I think I saw you in a dream once upon a time, princess,” he says to her, afterwards, when their fight is over and they’re left to catch their breath.

She smiles, and reaches up to cradle his head in her hands. This is trying. This is the soul mate mark, not telling her what to do, but telling her what she already knows – that they’re the ones who keep each other alive, have been keeping each other alive, for far too long. She doesn’t have to tell herself to breathe anymore.

Love is a choice, she remembers Raven saying. Well, she’s right. And it doesn’t have to be now, she doesn’t have to feel dictated to, but this is what she’s choosing.

“This isn’t a dream,” she says.

 

* * *

 

They deliver the other six to the police, for looking after, medical care, and distribution back into their families. They spend several hours down at the precinct afterwards, giving statements, signing them, making sure the case against Mount Weather is solid and indestructible. They’re sent off home with protection detail for Bellamy, and Octavia throws blankets and pillows onto the floor to make room for everyone.

Clarke’s the only one still awake when Bellamy comes out of the shower, probably because she’s been waiting for him in the dimly lit kitchen. He looks at her first, and then the pile of sleeping bodies on his apartment floor, and goes to sit beside her.

She pushes her mug over to him. “Hot chocolate.”

He closes his hands around the mug, pulls it towards himself, and doesn’t drink. He says, “Raven told me something, when we were down in the police station.”

“Yeah?”

“She mentioned that you … had a hard time with the soul mate mark. Like you thought it forced love.”

Oh. Well, then. “That’s not what I think,” Clarke says, and finds that surprisingly true. “Maybe it was. But a lot of people have been telling me a lot of things about it, and well, I’d like to at least try.”

“Try,” Bellamy repeats, and pauses. “Okay, then I’d like to start over.”

Clarke frowns and glances up at him. “What?”

He sticks out a hand and grins at her, open and easy. Like this, he is exactly the kind of person she’d like to get to know. “Hi, my name is Bellamy Blake. I’m a police officer.”

Clarke bites back a smile, and takes the hand. “Hi, Bellamy. My name’s Clarke. Doctor.”

“Nice to meet you, princess,” he tells her, like they aren’t soul mates, like she hasn’t just rescued him from the depths of an evil organization.

She finds she likes that, actually. They are two normal people, meeting for the first time. The marks on their wrists are irrelevant to anything else. They don’t have to be anything but themselves, in this moment.

Love is always a choice.

“Tell me about yourself, Bellamy,” she says, and he does.

 

* * *

 

 

**iv. hand in hand, i know you this time**

They send Monty and Jasper off back to Paris the next morning. Clarke sticks around a little bit longer, mostly because she’s got nowhere better to be, and then two weeks later leaves for New York with Raven and Bellamy in tow.

“Being a police officer was never really my thing anyway,” Bellamy had shrugged when Clarke had tentatively asked him about the future. “I’ll follow you back, and then I’ll go back to college for history, I think. I’ve always wanted to teach.”

“You’re a giant nerd,” Clarke had informed him, but she’d been smiling anyway.

“I wasn’t the one who called Octavia’s anatomy textbook _light reading_.”

“I’m a doctor, I’m supposed to be a giant nerd.”

Wick, Raven’s soul mate, had met them at LaGuardia, and Raven had no eyes for anyone else but him the minute he’d stepped into her line of sight. Raven had never been very big on PDA, but she gives him a hug, right there in the middle of the terminal with everyone watching, and Clarke had raised her eyebrows.

“I don’t know if you know Raven that well enough yet, but for this is basically a declaration of her eternal undying love complete with candles and ninety-nine red roses.”

Bellamy had looked at the couple speculatively, and then back at Clarke. “The first time we met, you kissed me.”

“Shut up. I’d been looking for you too long. You’re an asshole, did you know that?”

“Sorry for keeping my princess waiting. Won’t happen again.”

“Better not.”

“I did keep you alive, you know. For that entire year. You’d probably be dead right now if not for me,” he points out reasonably. “This last month was completely justified.”

“Are you comparing my drug addiction to your hostage situation? Because that’s just … wrong. On so many levels.”

“Yeah, probably. But still –”

They’re still bickering when Raven and Wick finish up and come over to make introductions.

 

* * *

 

 

He moves into her apartment, not that either of them had expected anything else. He enrolls in New York University, she goes back to work, and it’s like the past month had never happened at all – but now there’s Bellamy, right there in front of her every single day reminding her of everything that is finally right in her life. It’s easy, and it’s right, and he’s her choice.

She’s his as well. Maybe that’s what Harper had meant by trying, after all.

“I used to see you all the time in my dreams,” he confesses, once, when it’s late and she’s just gotten off a shift at the hospital and found him waiting in bed for her, a book propped up in his hands.

“Well, now I feel cheated. I never saw you, not once.”

“It was during that year, I think,” he says carefully, watching her expression as she climbs in with him. “1971.”

“You’re never going to forget about that year,” she mumbles, burying her head into her pillow. It smells like him.

“You’ve never forgotten about that year,” Bellamy says gently, and turns towards her to drape an arm around her waist. “Clarke –”

“I know,” she sighs. “But it’s over now.”

He pauses. “It was like your subconscious was deliberately seeking me out, you know. And all I knew was that this short blonde thing was in trouble and needed me, and I couldn’t do a damn thing.”

“You kept me alive all those times I should’ve overdosed and died,” she says to his shirt. “You know that, right? You did everything.”

“I know.” He pulls her a little closer. “Maybe the universe knew I couldn’t live without you.”

A corner of her lip quirks upwards. “Well, technically –”

“Shh, I’m trying to be romantic here,” he interrupts, trying to sound offended and failing.

“Maybe that’ll be our forever, you know,” she says sleepily. “Always saving each other.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“No, it doesn’t.”


End file.
